


Balikbayan

by bathroom_mirror



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Minecraft: Story Mode (Minecraft), Minecraft: Story Mode - Fandom
Genre: Body Horror, Giant Spiders, Gore, Human Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Monsters, Nightmares, Spiders, Suicidal Ideation, Swearing, Unreliable Narrator, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21672898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bathroom_mirror/pseuds/bathroom_mirror
Summary: In which a revived Cassie Rose finds herself in an apocalyptic wasteland and drowns herself in denial.
Relationships: Cassie Rose & Aiden (Minecraft)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	1. Target Practice

**Author's Note:**

> advanced apologies. this is so long and also old writing. i. i dont think a rewrite would be happening anytime soon haha

**0**

* * *

Cassie didn't immerse herself in Greek mythology. Despite the vast amount of knowledge and stories the library in the mansion had to offer her, Cassie had kept herself to research and novels. Never had she had any interest in myths, much less the fables of worlds that didn't even exist.

And yet, as she stood up on the cliff and looked down at the tragedy before her, all the girl could think of was Ragnarok.

The destruction of the gods.

But there was no such thing as god. The only people that came close were greedy, ridiculous, good-for-nothing humans who, ultimately, proved themselves to be a farce. Incompetent, _laughable_.

Those people weren't the ones laying dead in this fallout. The people here weren't dictators or scientists or kings. No, each person who lay bloody, torn and ripped apart, scratched, eaten, was an every man. Normal, plain, boring. All of them, victims to the virus that had infected this world so long ago.

(Just like her so-called friends.)

But that's what it was, all she could think that this world was. _Ragnarok_. There wasn't anything she could do about that, even if it didn't make sense.

To be fair, it made just about as much sense as her standing here in the first place.

So we have that.

* * *

**1**

* * *

Considering her history, death was nothing knew to Cassie. She'd died multiple times, in more ways than one. The tingling pain that came with respawning, the remnants of her fatal wounds, she'd largely gotten used to at this point.

Still, the phrase "you learn something new everyday" had never rang more true for her until today.

She wondered how death by Endermites wasn't a thing in the games yet.

A loud scream woke Cassie from her slumber. Bleary eyes tried to blink sleep away as a strong current of air passed through, chilling the girl. Annoyed by the wake up call, Cassie got up with a grunt, then a gasp as everything she moved stung and blazed like a flare too close for comfort. Her legs, hands, head; her entire body hurt, and it hurt like _hell_. Several sensations flooded through her all at once: The brief feeling of wind flying by her as she fell, the harsh landing into gravel and obsidian, endermites crawling all over, millions upon millions of claws prickling at every part of her while teeth bit into her skin-

A wasteland came to mind like a godsend, distracting her. Breathing in through clenched teeth to relieve the pain, Cassie desperately clung to the thought, the picture, whatever it was. She took hold of whatever she could find- the disastrous state of all the towns and cities that once stood tall and proud, the bodies strewn about every place one could look, all battered and torn and decorated with blood: the carnage committed by betrayed youth.

Horrific images, but for whatever reason, the apocalyptic world that she saw before her was welcome.

The overgrown forest which had monsters lurking in it was a particularly pleasant sight.

As her limbs began to feel like they were being swallowed in an eternal, paradoxical loop, Cassie wondered if she should laugh or be worried about her comfort in the macabre. And like every other event in which this had happened, she decided to take a third option; namely to let it go and move on.

With the pain now numb and hazy, Cassie stood. She still shook slightly (relentlessly) as she familiarized herself with her surroundings. Her surroundings which she found rather suspiciously matched what she'd seen in her distraction.

Perhaps she'd simply seen it in her peripheral?

Regardless, the girl continued forward, passing under an arch on a cobblestone pathway that lead to demolished town, almost exactly like how she'd seen it in her 'vision' (for lack of a better word). A copper scent emanated from the place and it grew stronger as she got closer. In the abnormal moonlight, Cassie could see bodies and blood all over the place. Some of them were still in one piece, others have been torn apart or decapitated, and it only added to the atmosphere of a place a monster or two had passed through.

Cassie walked through town without any heed to what exactly she was walking on, making wet squishes and crunched noises every other step she took. Aside from that, everything was silent.

"Hh…"

Until she heard _that_.

It was faint, incredibly faint, and Cassie had to have been straining her ears to even hear it over the loud sound of leaves, bodies and rotten food she'd been walking over just earlier. She paused, listened.

Bushes in the forest far away rustled before something flew straight out of the trees. The flapping of its wings was loud enough to be heard all the way from town, and Cassie could see the figure flying against the moon's light before diving for somewhere further off.

Another whimper.

Cassie could hear it a little clearly now. The whimpers turned into sobs, getting progressively louder within seconds. And from what she could hear, it seemed to have been coming from the plaza, straight ahead. So she continued forward, her pace slowed and steps careful to not make noise. The wet cobblestone slowly became muddy tiles, and Cassie took even lighter steps than earlier. All around the plaza were, aside from the ubiquitous corpses, abandoned and pushed over benches and market stalls and, at the center, a fountain. Sitting on the fountain bench was a girl, shaking with sobs.

"Hh.. hh… hh…"

The crying girl didn't seem to notice Cassie coming.

Taking this opportunity to get a better look, the redhead stepped closer and scrutinized the girl. Despite the dirt smeared all over her, her skin was noticeably pale and her wavy, dark hair, impossibly silky and reaching the floor, gleamed in the moonlight.

Another oddity in this apocalypse, Cassie had to assume.

"Hello? Are you okay?" she called from a few feet away, "Can I help you?"

Another oddity, but someone familiar in this hellscape, at least.

The girl stiffened, her sobs still audible and her shoulders still shaking. Cassie watched as the girl slowly lowered her bare legs to the floor, arms going to her sides and head still hung low. Her white dress is oddly clean and her green eyes are wide with fear.

"It's alright, I'm not gonna hurt you."

Both girls stared at each other, eyes fixed and anticipating.

Then she ran.

"Hey!"

The girl sprinted straight for the forest, leaving behind a trail of dust and leaves and a startled Cassie chasing right after her.

"Hey, come back!" She yelled through the massive amount of fauna the forest held between its trees. "I just want to talk!"

Leaves were crushed and vines were swayed and ran through as the redhead chased after the girl. Passing sounds of cicadas and fleeing creatures went by Cassie while she ran, her continuous and short breaths accompanying the rushing wind, all of these sounds filling her ears at once. The runaway meanwhile seemed to be without dilemma, her long hair not at all getting caught in the numerous trees and plants that abound the path. She ran with ease, her pace getting faster and faster as she tried to evade the murderer far behind her. The latter herself wasn't very appreciative of this.

"Come on! I won't hurt you, I promise!"

But Cassie's assurances were ignored and the sounds went back to the cicadas, the wind and the leaves. Both girls continued to run; one fleeing, the other chasing. It was almost endless, with everything Cassie heard and saw being the same everywhere she looked. All except for the girl who'd begun crossing between trees and leaving the moonlit path. The black and white image of the girl flickered, smearing against the darker hues of the forest.

The girl ran faster.

Cassie followed suit.

Eventually, the trees began to spread out, the forest feeling less and less cluttered and crowded. As the forest began to clear, the girl did too. She tried as best as she could to follow wherever the ghost of the girl went, and she did, following flying leaves and swaying vines.

Then all of a sudden, everything was white.

* * *

**2**

* * *

Cassie bolted out of the forest and landed on dirt with a scream.

"God fucking dammit!"

Blonde blades of grass and straw flew around the redhead, dust spreading from where she landed. She coughed and swore and cursed at herself but for what, she didn't know.

When the dust settled, she lay still, her ears ringing and breathing slowing. Faint thumps sounded from far away, the sound of footsteps or hooves, claws or stumps, she couldn't tell which was which.

But they were running, running through the ground, roots and grass and the numbness through her, going straight and loud in her ear.

And they rung.

" _Okay, this might hurt. If it's too much, just tell me."_

It hurt.

" _I don't want to hurt you, but we have to do this alright? ...You see that poster over there? Focus on that. Distractions can help with the pain."_

She focused on something else.

Green eyes gazed at the blurry image of the forest she'd just run from. She couldn't see the girl nor could she remember hearing her.

So she'd lost her.

Just like how she'd lost her friends and her way home.

What a long list of failures.

Having successfully distracted herself from what was bothering her just moments earlier, Cassie got up with a groan, brushing grass and dust off her clothes. She looked around the clearing, expecting and finding no sight of the girl. All there was was just her, the clearing, and the surrounding forest.

And of course, the moonlight.

She looked up at the moon, squinting and blinking her eyes upon seeing the bright light. It stared back at her, the thing twitching in blues and reds as it tried to move from its position, stuck.

The redhead breathed a laugh at the moon's pitiful state, "Loser."

She looked back down to ground level, taking a gander at the trees lined up around her. Nothing but forest ambience emanated from the place, and truth be told it seemed like there never was a chase at all. An odd sight, but it wasn't the strangest thing Cassie's seen today so far.

Suddenly, hysterical laughter rang through the air. Cassie whipped her head in the sound's direction, hearing it just beyond the other edge of the forest. It was swiftly accompanied by inhuman screams, then, literally seconds later, a large explosion and something shattering to pieces. Cassie jumped and blinked rapidly at the surprising turn of events she'd just heard; and if her posture hadn't straightened then, it did right that moment when she was able to see the mushroom cloud from where she stood.

...

"'Guess I'll die."

Cassie let out an exasperated sigh, now resigning herself to going along with whatever happened in this strange world.

So she followed the source of the explosion and trudged through the forest, this time with the pleasure of not having to chase anything, taking her time in getting to the other side. While this was, on one part, because of her not wanting to run again, it was also because she'd heard the battle get increasingly heated on the other side (she was _sure_ it was a battle at this point). Judging by the same hysterical laughter repeating over and over and the different kind of inhuman sounds, it must've been one monster against a number of others, none of them alike. So really, biding her time in getting there wasn't that bad of an idea, and even if there was something there waiting for her, it's not like running to get there would change anything. The numerous explosions must have already made it sure that whatever was on the other side, it's already long gone. Cassie could get by simply seeing the remnants.

It was when the chaos came to a stop that Cassie finally made it to the source. That source being another city, one in just as much disrepair as the one from before. Though unlike the first one, which was humble and otherwise normal, this one was built on expensive material. Cassie herself was surprised to see all the polished diorite and quartz still surviving all the blasts she heard before and roofs that looked to be made of diamonds and gold, of all things, still floated in midair. Even with the city in a state of a warzone, traces of its immense wealth (and waste of said wealth, in Cassie's opinion) still remained.

"Show-off," was all the girl could say to verbalize what she thought. Though as much as she was perplexed by the utter waste of resources, she found herself even more confused by how large portions of the buildings survived the battle.

One particularly egregious example was a very modern, just as extravagant and showy house sitting to the side and completely and utterly untouched.

Somehow.

With suspicion high, Cassie crept into the city, her eyes darting around every corner for anything that could charge at and attack her. She walked over anything that could make noise and kept switching between looking around and down at the ground. Once she finally made it to the house itself, she kept away from the grass, which was covered in soot and and odd liquid she didn't want to know about, and walked on the cobblestone path to the stairs. Nothing made itself known while Cassie went up the stairs and made it to the house.

Seeing that she was in the clear, she peeked in through the window before opening the door and hurriedly making it inside.

The door closed with a soft click and Cassie turned around; the first thing she found was quiet.

Everything was in order, _too much order_. Not the appearance of the house itself, no, it was abandoned and dusty and some things were falling apart, but it was quiet.

"Hello?"

Nothing answered.

"Is someone there?"

_Is someone waiting for me?_

There was nothing.

Cassie took in a deep breath while glancing around, before finally letting go of the tension and actually taking in her surroundings. The room she'd just entered, the living room, gave off a stuffy, arrogant air. Moonlight streaming in through the windows showed lush couches and extravagant decor. The decoration of the room seemed pretentious, even more than the town had. It was as if the owner wanted to impress. Walking through the place itself furthered this point as rooms and halls were decorated with modern furniture and expensive paintings. (But even then, she had to admit that at the very least, the place looked nice, disregarding the effects of the apocalypse on it.)

Seeing all the unnecessary arrangements, Cassie bit her lip and wondered if she'd rather spend her life in here or the more cabin-like and cozy mansion back in the other world.

'Neither' was the option she chose. (As comfortable as the mansion was built to be, she'd seen enough of it for one lifetime.)

One of the rooms she came across was small, but there were so many things packed inside it. She came in, curious to see what was there, finding half an armory, half a gallery (sort of). Measly things like chain armor and golden apples were hovering on pedestals while weapons and tools were left untouched. She frowned as she stepped closer, taking an iron sword off of its display hooks. The sword felt firm in her hands, like any normal - and good - sword. It didn't seem to be used at all, and even with all the dust coating it and the age, it was perfectly fine.

Meaning it could come in handy.

She brushed dust off and kept it along with her diamond axe, which was still in pretty good condition, considering. On that note, she looked at the the rest of her inventory and was struck by how empty it was. In her battle against Jesse, she'd completely forgotten how she let go of most of her things when she faked her death. All that was left with her were ender pearls, which she used up in vain, and...

_I had salmon with me, didn't I?_

No, she fed it to…

To…

Cassie grabbed the bows and arrows from the wall and fled the room, stuffing them into her pocket. The colors of orange, black and white, she pushed out of her mind.

" _Distractions can help with the pain."_

Coming up to a crevice in the hall, at the very back of the house, was a door to the backyard. She opened it carefully, making as little noise as possible, then walked down the steps to the rather clean and well kept backyard. On one end was an entrance shack to, presumably, the basement; on the other end, a mound of dirt. It looked like a grave, but whose?

She ignored it and headed straight for the basement entrance. She hefted the door open, not anticipating the hinges giving way and giving out a groan. Cassie winced, _'Hopefully, no one heard that.'_

Oh, who was she kidding?

She hurried in as quietly as she could and closed the door shut.

Cassie Rose gave herself away.

* * *

**3**

* * *

The basement turned out to be a workshop, as Cassie found when she flipped the lever next to the stairs. There was dust all around and the lights flickered constantly, no doubt the result of long term abandonment; it even showed in the cracked sand block walls. Cabinets and wooden tables lined the room. There were blueprints and notes scattered all over work benches and some of them were even on the floor. Scraps of mechanical parts and wires were left on the tables, all of them unfinished, save for one.

Curious to what it was, Cassie stepped closer. (Was the ceiling giving way? She could've sworn she heard sand fall somewhere.)

It was a small, black thing on a pile of tissue; next to the thing was a note with presumably a name, but whatever was written was smudged. She took the strange object, raising a brow at its weird shape. Most of it was made of a combination of materials ( _It's called plastic, isn't it?_ ), and the two ends of the looped thing were made of some cloth-like material ( _Fuzz. It's called fuzz, right? They're used for jukeboxes_ ). Oddly enough, part of the bigger shape of the object reminded her of an ear; protruding from the bottom part was an L-shaped stick. There were a couple of buttons on the thing, too.

Cassie looked at the odd object with a look, but then shrugged. _What's the harm?_ She died once before, she didn't think trying an alien object out would do much damage to her. (And even if it did, she didn't particularly care.) Considering the shape it reminded her off, she tried to put it in her ear, struggling when she realized she didn't know how it was supposed to be placed. The fact that there was a long stick thing attached to it didn't help.

After a while of figuring it out (and looking stupid while doing it, no doubt), Cassie successfully put it on. Her face contorted into confusion when nothing happened. She poked it repeatedly and fiddled with the thing, an awkward silence taking everything over.

_...Wow, I like this turn of-_

" _ **AAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"**_

The ground shook and sand from the ceiling began to leak and break away from the sand blocks, and Cassie _could_ have been able to hear something heavy upstairs walking around, _right outside the freaking basement_ and causing the ground to shake, if it weren't for the sudden ringing attacking her left ear.

" _HOLY FUCKING SHIT._ "

"WHAT THE-"

_Someone else is here?!_

"Who are you?!"

"Who am I?! _Who are you?!_ "

"I asked first!"

So many things were going on at once and Cassie had never missed silence before now. The loud thumping upstairs, which she now realised sounded or had something mechanical to it, relented and interrupted both her and the other voice.

" _ **Come out, come out, wherever you are!"**_ Came the voice of, she presumed, the monster. It sounded like it was coming out of a speaker. _**"I know you're here somewhere!"**_

The other voice panicked. " _What the hell is that?!_ "

Cassie herself was no different, although she was less scared; more confused, really. " _Don't ask me!_ "

*THUMP!*

That was right above the room.

Cassie and the boy, the second voice, waited in tense silence. Then the monster said in a singsong, _**"You're hiding in the basement, aren't you?"**_

The redhead swore loudly.

"Well shit, she got you."

She yelled and turned for the basement door, "No fucking shit!"

The monster above continued its taunts. Cassie gave the ceiling a glare and grumbled, "Okay, fuck that, monster first."

"You're in a basement?"

He seemed to take on a more serious stance at her change of subject.

"Yeah, why?" She looked around briefly for anything that could possibly help her, but found nothing. All she could use were the weapons she grabbed from the armory and what she had from the mansion; and she didn't even know what she was up against, so just going upstairs without a plan wouldn't do her any good.

The monster upstairs seemed to stop moving, but Cassie could swear she heard something hiss. She gave everything in the room a cautious look; the boy on the other side of the earpiece didn't have much of the same paranoia, asking, "I've- It'll take too long to explain, but I think I can help you if I know exactly where you are."

Cassie didn't know what to make of her luck right now. "Wh- I-" She looked everywhere.

_What the hell was that_ hissing _?_

She grumbled. Anything that could possibly help her right now was more than welcome. "Alright, fine! I'm in a basement, in the backyard of a house in some super pretentious, super modern town." The girl wished she could be as calm as the boy was in the moment. "It's also out in the middle of effin' nowhere and near a forest." She looked back at the basement door and- was it being pulled out?!

Her eyes widened, "And just an FYI, the monster's literally right outside, she knows I'm here. Pulling the door out right now, as we speak."

Then a new sound came through, was it paper? "Okay wait," The boy said, "I think I know where you are."

_Note to self, ask more about this guy later._

"Champion City, right? Then- oh shit."

Cassie swore under her breath. The door was _so close_ to giving way. "What? What is it?!"

The monster was about to come in, so there wasn't anything wrong with her hiding. Perhaps in the cabinet in the corner?

Screw it, she's gonna hide.

"Okay, I think I know the monster now."

Right at that moment, the doors gave way, and splinters and pieces of the door flew into the room. Cassie flinched violently and hit the back of the closet with a loud 'thud!' Though it must've been covered up by the loud sound of the doors. She hoped they did.

" _ **KYAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I've found you, darling~ There's nowhere for you to run and nowhere to hide…"**_

' _Eat shit, asshole.'_ The redhead thought to herself.

"...She's in the room with you right now, isn't she?"

"I'm hiding, it's fine." She whispered, "Just tell me more about this stupid monster, I can't see her from here."

"Her name's Lunacy." The boy's voice was loud in her ear, and Cassie was grateful for being able to hear him over the monster's- Lunacy's - mad laughter, "She was originally this woman named Stella before she got infected by the virus."

"Virus? What virus?"

"I don't know, okay?! Anyway, she was kind of the leader of this place? And I guess that's the reason she's the only monster there or something."

Outside, Cassie could hear Lunacy moving the furniture while crawling around the room.

"You mean _you're not sure_?"

"Look it- it's pretty dark in here, okay? I can't see much."

Cassie closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. "Alright, never mind that, how can I fight her?"

"Well, she's usually in a reasonably humanoid form…"

"Usu-"

"She can-"

" _ **There you are~"**_

Cassie jumped with a scream, accidentally throwing herself out of the closet and knocking it down. She landed at the opposite side of the room with a loud thud, quickly putting her hair away from her face and giving the closet a confused and terrified look. "What the hell?!"

"Why? What's wrong?"

The girl got up within seconds and scrambled for a weapon, head whipping around in every direction for any sign of a monster, but found nothing. The room was utterly empty, though moonlight now swept into the basement thanks to the door now being in pieces.

_What? But…_

She looked back up at the closet, empty and now with both doors hanging off of loose hinges.

"I-" Cassie could barely get the words out, "I could've _sworn_ I heard her in there. I swear she was in the closet with me, I heard her!"

"That- that- oh." She turned to the stairs and listened for anything that might clue her in to Lunacy's location, but all she heard was humming, and it was coming from _all sides of the room_. "What do you mean 'oh?'" She asked, irritated.

"Ok-okay, full list of Lunacy's abilities here: she can throw her voice, mimic other people's voices, and manipulate any kind of machinery to do _anything_ , including changing her appearance."

Well _that_ explains it.

Cassie screwed her eyes shut, "Of course."

She climbed up the stairs as the boy continued, "You can use her limbs against her, though; she'll be weakened significantly if you cut her connection to her machines."

Making it to the basement entrance, Cassie peeked outside. As far as she was concerned, Lunacy wasn't anywhere right next to the basement. The loud sounds of grinding and groans of large, rusted objects being dragged together coming from the inside of the city clued her in pretty well. "What 'machines' exactly? And what do you mean limbs?"

"Uh.." The flipping of pages, "Er.. Anything that has wires."

If only Cassie could see the boy face to face, maybe he'd be affected by her deadpan expression. To be fair to him, though, he caught on within seconds and rectified his statement with, "Her arms are made up of extendable wires and she uses those to keep her machines together."

Knowing that the coast was clear, Cassie left the basement and crept her way around the house. "So all the machines are kind of like extended limbs for her?"

Peeking around the house confirmed this suspicion for Cassie, as she saw a blonde figure in the distance with her arms spread to her sides. Wires coiled and snaked around her arms, hands, and multiple pieces of rubble and redstone machines, tying them together. It looked almost like a painting Cassie would have seen in the mansion, a display of power; her cape blowing in the oncoming breeze and the woman's hysterical laughter completed the picture. "Yeah, pretty much."

Hiding back behind the wall, Cassie replied, "So I basically cut her arms off."

"That would only weaken her, though."

She took out her axe and tossed it low in the air, testing it. "Anything on how to take her out completely?"

"Uh… No, it's all smudged."

She had to roll her eyes. "How convenient."

"You can just wing it, though, right?"

For a moment, Cassie thought to protest with common sense, but her mind brought her back to arenas, laboratories, and an endermite pit, and suddenly she conceded the boy's point. "Yeah, sure."

"Oh- then, uh, great." He said in response, though he sounded more surprised than Cassie thought he should. Regardless, she peeked back onto the road, where Lunacy was still dragging machinery to her form. Hearing a noise nearby, the girl looked down to see pieces of rubble from the other building being dragged along by wires, redstone machines joining them. She looked around with a higher sense of alert and saw that Lunacy's web of wires extended throughout the whole city.

_So land isn't an option for me._

She scanned the rest of the landscape, at all the buildings and houses. Most were in pieces, either stuck to the ground or staying put in midair, but the sizes of the different buildings' remnants varied.

One such remnant was high enough above Lunacy's current spot.

Cassie remembered the bows and arrows she snatched from the armory.

Something began to form and a grin grew on her face as she looked around her; in front, at the house, below, at the weapons, and at the back, the forest. Specifically, the trees.

"Bingo."

"Huh? What do you-?"

Ignoring the boy, Cassie went for the trees and began to climb its branches, making her way to the top. Steadying herself on two different branches, she glanced down several feet below at the spot where she once was, then up, the roof of the intact house not too high. After quick glance at her inventory, she took out the iron sword and her diamond axe, her eyes on the large distance between the tree and the diorite (and rather _bland_ ) walls of the house.

_Nothing like a good challenge._

She stepped back slightly, hearing the bark crack under her sneakers, then ran, launching herself toward the wall. The sound of her weapons piercing the wall was lost to Lunacy's transformation, which Cassie now dismissed as background noise; for now, her attention was focused on climbing up the wall. After a small struggle she was able to tug her sword out of the hole it had made and stabbed the space above her, then did the same with the axe, removing it from the crack it left on the house; she pulled on the sword's handle and raised herself up, then struck the higher wall. She repeated this process a little more, climbing higher and higher until she made it to the roof.

With a grunt she lifted herself onto the sandblock surface, taking her weapons from where they were lodged when she was done. Tucking the axe away, she looked down at the town, eyes widening upon seeing that Lunacy now not only had extended, larger, mecha-arms, but also had cranes and scaffolding attached or protruding from her back. They were formed like an octopus' tentacles, but they seemed like a spider's while stabbing and piercing the ground below her as the woman moved, no longer relying on her own humanoid legs.

"Well," Cassie muttered between breaths, "This is peachy."

" _What_ is peachy?"

She'd almost forgotten about the boy on the other side. "Lunacy's... _upgraded_ herself."

"Oh, Jesus." He face-palmed, or at least, Cassie heard him do so.

"But don't worry," She walked over to the other edge, looking over the neighboring building, or the floating pieces of what was left of it, "I've got a plan."

"Really."

The girl felt cheeky and mischievous when she heard his deadpan response, running for and jumping onto the floating platform with ease as she did so. "Yeah, definitely." There was a platform below hers, low enough to get a good look at the street but still high enough so she could still jump from platform to platform. She dropped down to the rubble. "Right."

Lunacy was currently looking away from her with only one of her spider legs north east of where she stood, but a safe distance away from her house. Speakers that Cassie only now noticed were stuck to poles blared with the mad woman's voice, saying, _**"I know you're here somewhere, love~"**_

Cassie focused more on the monster's arms, trying to discern the wires from the rusted parts.

" _ **I heard you talking just now."**_

Suddenly, the earpiece gave a click, and there was nothing but dead silence in Cassie's ear. "What-?"

Lunacy snapped in her direction with a crack, catching the redhead off guard with a laugh that somehow wasn't muffled by her clown mask. She swung her arm right under Cassie's feet and in a panic she leapt for another platform, just as the monster raised her arm and destroyed the building entirely.

_Wait!_

She looked down at Lunacy's incoming arm, literally a split second away from destroying the platform she stood on.

_Shouldn't cutting her arms weaken her?_

With milliseconds to go, Cassie kept the sword and switched from the platform to the amalgamation of an arm, latching onto rusty pieces sticking out of the bulk.

The monster let out a yell of surprise when she saw her target not on lying dead in rubble, but clinging to her arm. Enraged, she screamed and swung her arm further forward, Cassie holding on for dear life and hair flying in the wind.

Though she wasn't swayed by the movement, the chaos was distracting, and Cassie had to wonder what happened to the boy while she regained her bearings. She hadn't heard him say anything since Lunacy spotted her.

_No_ ; she shook her head, she shouldn't allow herself to get distracted. She tightened her grip on a handlebar with one hand as she let go of a window pane, moving her hair out of her face and trying to see what was going on around her. Lunacy, from behind her mask, glared at the girl, and her snarls were amplified by the speakers all around town as she tried to get the intruder off her arm. Cassie looked up just in time to avoid one of her 'tentacles,' accidentally letting go of the handlebar in the process. She grabbed another object sticking out as Lunacy let out a scream from her self-inflicted injury.

_Idiot_ , Cassie thought.

From the ends of the now partly-amputated arm, the wires spazzed and writhed around, sending sparks flying from their tips. The same could be said for the part that landed on the ground with a loud _THUD!_ The rubble and machinery that had previously been tied together were now scattered on the ground.

" _ **Get off me!"**_ Lunacy screamed from the speakers, her voice only slightly worse for wear from the injury.

Deciding not to respond, the girl traced the ends of the cut wires, now able to discern cord from rubble. Hearing a metallic groan behind her, she turned her head with wide eyes, then dodged again, this time grabbing the first wire she saw in front of her. She dropped right below the spiked leg, the loose wire giving way to her weight. Another one of Lunacy's screams sounded through.

She climbed up the wire, this time grabbing and hanging from the leg now impaling Lunacy's arms. From there she pulled at the wire, tugging it hard from its place and causing even more pain for the monster as she did so.

" _ **Stop…! Stop it!"**_

Cassie didn't know if she was hearing things, or if Lunacy was actually _begging_. Nevertheless, she moved on to the rest of the cords, pulling them away from the monster. As she did so, the arm began to lower, Lunacy's balance, along with her composure, faltering as well.

Lunacy sent another one of her scaffold-made tentacles after Cassie, this time carefully avoiding her arm. Out of instinct, she grabbed the tentacle right in front of her to keep her balance, her right hand still holding on to the wire.

" _ **Let go of me!"**_

Suddenly, the familiar hissing from earlier returned, followed immediately by the wire flying out of her hands. Then the arm began to lower, the groan of metal grinding together, and then the sounds of rubble falling to the ground below.

She was letting go of her arm.

Cursing under her breath, Cassie took hold of the tentacle with her other hand and climbed, just as Lunacy began to retract it from its spot.

"Goddammit goddammit goddammit goddammit-"

The climb continued anyhow, not without Cassie feeling a bit dizzy and nauseous, but it continued, even when she saw Lunacy letting go of her other limbs. She continued climbing until she was high enough and looked down at the monster.

Was that a box on her back?

Her head snapped in Cassie's direction, and in that same moment, something slithered beneath her fingers. Wide eyed, she looked down and saw the wires move forward. Rapidly.

_Fuck._

Lifting her head slowly, green eyes followed the direction, seeing the red, blue and black move like snakes right to Lunacy, to the box on her back.

A sense of triumph that she so dearly missed returned to Cassie, and she had to remind herself to not celebrate early.

The scaffolding connected to the pole she held onto now groaned, then joined all the other rubble. The pole was following soon after.

"Oh, that bitch."

Quickly, she climbed up the descending pole and, right when it was about to fall, latched onto the next thing, a crane. Her legs swung in the air, very, _very_ , high above the road, but not so much the box on Lunacy's back. Bracing herself, the girl started to swing her body, forward then back, forward then back. The groans of metal were loud in her ear and the boy was absent still.

Then, when the crane gave way, she swung forward and jumped, and it felt like time slowed. She took out her axe, which wasn't anywhere near breaking point, and swung it at the metal box.

Lunacy screamed.

* * *

**4**

* * *

Sparks. She heard them first, along with the cackle of fire, before her eyes opened to a blurry world. Far away, she could see a pile of something brown with yellow things bursting out and orange dancing.

She closed her eyes and let out a mix of a groan and an exasperated sigh.

Her back stung.

Again.

_What a joy._

"Hello?" The radio cackled, like fire. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Heaving herself up from dirt and rubble, her breathing was fast and unsteady and gravel and soil stuck to her palms. Up ahead, in the middle of the city's road, lay the remnants of the entire town, scaffolding and rubble piled on top of each other, rusty and abandoned, grime, soot and dirt covering every inch of them. The smoke from the fire rose to the sky and the smell reached all the way to the edge of the forest, where Cassie currently stood.

It feels as though she just woke up.

"Hey, are you there? Are you okay?"

She coughed into her sleeve before answering the boy, "I'm fine."

"Oh, thank god." He breathed a sigh of relief, "Hey uh, sorry for bailing on you earlier. I remembered that Lunacy could control any machine, so I thought she might have heard us talking, and if you told me your plan…"

Her inventory had the notable absence of an axe. Cassie hummed as she looked back up at the city.

"Yeah, no, it's fine. I ended up scrapping that plan anyway."

"Oh."

The road was now clear, mostly, and she was able to walk to the battle spot with ease. She climbed the rubble, lazy and groggy, like a zombie, not minding at all the hazards coming from literally everything around her. All she needed to find right now was Lunacy's corpse.

"So she's dead, she's gone? You defeated her?"

It was right in the center of the mound.

"Yeah, I did."

"Awesome."

She landed in the small clearing with a huff and grabbed hold her axe from the broken fuse box, sparks flying out of it. A burst of them came out when she removed the weapon.

Lunacy didn't seem to notice.

The monster herself lay still, face first into the dirt, right on top of a pool of her own blood. Sparks continued to fly out.

Then she began to fade.

Cassie did nothing but watch with narrowed, confused eyes as her body turned translucent. She could see something glow yellow in the blonde's bosom, right underneath the fuse box, and it got brighter and brighter as more of Lunacy disappeared until finally, she was gone, leaving behind only the glowing ball.

"What the hell…?"

"Why? What's wrong?"

Curious, Cassie crouched down, holding her hand out at the floating object. When she got close enough, it _moved_ to her, finally making it to and laying in her hands.

It felt… familiar?

"What's this?"

Like it should fit in her hand, and it _did_ , but it felt like it belonged to her.

"What's what?"

She played around with the thing, and it followed. "Lunacy's body faded and stuff, but she left behind this… _thing_. Some sort of glowing ball."

"Maybe it's her inventory?"

The glow faltered for a second.

"No, it doesn't look like it. She didn't, y'know…"

Her brows furrowed, right hand moving around to try and find the right word.

Go up in a cloud of smoke?

"Poof?"

"You call it _poof_?"

"Is there any other way to describe it?"

Cassie thought with a frown.

"Okay fine. Anyway, she didn't poof, and no inventory appeared after she faded away."

"Huh. Weird."

Cassie moved to keep it in her inventory along with her weapons. It stayed put.

"Well, whatever it means, it's in my inventory for now. FYI."

"Alright."

The sound of papers rustling reminded her.

"Hey," she began as she turned and climbed out of the garbage heap, "so since I'm not in the middle of a battle anymore, would you mind telling me how you knew all about Lunacy?"

"Huh-? Oh! Yeah." Cassie squinted at the land beyond the rest of the city. It was still pretty far (just like how the boy's voice sounded at the moment), she'd have to go through the rest of town to get there. "I'm in some sort of office? There are papers and files _everywhere_ , it's really cluttered."

There only seemed to be forest beyond the border, though.

"We were lucky the file for Lunacy was right on the desk."

Her axe safe in her inventory, she walked, surveying the ruins around her. "Desk?"

"Yeah. There's a bunch of weird machines and a mic in this, which I guess is how I'm talking to you."

"Oh, neat."

"I guess."

There was silence between them for a brief moment, when all Cassie heard were her footsteps.

_Wait a minute._

Her brows furrowed and she frowned.

_I don't know this guy's name._

"Hey, we haven't introduced ourselves yet, have we?"

"Hah," the boy chuckled, "I guess not."

"My name's-" she paused, hesitating for a moment, but it only lasted a second, "my name's Cassie Rose."

"That's a nice name. It's nice to meet you, Cassie Rose."

Her head tilted at the compliment, a brow raised. "Thanks." She continued her pace. "And you are?"

"Aiden. My name's Aiden."

A faint smile on her lips. Her features softened.

He has a nice name, too.

"Well, it's nice to meet you too, Aiden."


	2. Agony of the Enderman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how to: tell that i did this at 1am

**0**

* * *

It's quiet. Of course it would be, nobody would have any reason to be here, and even if there were, they wouldn't be able to hear or say anything. Not if there wasn't anything extraordinary about them.

Which must be why he's here, standing dumbly in tattered clothing, mixed feelings of confusion and excitement contradicting each other as he faced her with wide eyes. Taking in his surroundings, soft colors fading in and out of each other and reflective squares overlapping the shape of a monster's remains, he breathes in. To him, it looks amazing.

Naturally.

Like the sadist that he is.

(Although 'sadist' might be an exaggeration, she feels it appropriate, especially given the context of the current situation. Because a normal person would be terrified by being within the very fabric of multi reality, nevermind the first layer of it.

But him?)

Now satisfied, he looked back at her, his head tilted, curious. "So should I know you?"

Her eyes are cold and condescending, dark as if she's seeing the filthiest thing in all of existence. She won't give him an answer; nothing satisfactory, especially after what he's done, what he would do.

_The bastard doesn't deserve it._

(She felt to laugh. Oh, how demonized she would be if his knights heard her call him that.

If he were one to have any knights.)

A smirk on his face. "No answer, then?" He closed his eyes and laughed, "Yeah, that's on me for assuming."

At least he knows.

* * *

**1**

* * *

Cassie was right about it only being forest beyond the borders of Champion City. There had been empty land, presumably for crops, after the city, then trees lined against each other on the border. After that it was right back into the cluster of trees.

Or, in short terms, confusion.

“So how do you think we’re talking?”

Aiden, the boy on the other end of the earpiece, had been trying to start up a conversation ever since the very brief mess that happened literally minutes earlier.

“You think it’s some sort of… advanced redstone?”

To be fair to him, they were both new to this situation.

“Or something?”

...Still, she’s beginning to regret putting a voice in her head.

“Yeah, ‘or something.’” She said dismissively, wanting more to focus on getting to the other side of the forest. In the silence, Cassie could swear he pulled a face, likely wanting a more proper answer than anything else. 

Reluctantly, she gave him that proper answer, “Okay, yes, it is advanced redstone.”

“But-” _Click Click Click_

She stopped short in her tracks and fell silent. 

The forest was a little less so. Just as earlier, there were cicadas, small animals, bushes and trees rustling in the wind. It’s to be expected, it’s a forest, but that sound was… inhuman.

Considering her earlier encounter, she has every right to be suspicious.

Her steps are lighter.

“Cassie?”

“As I was saying-” She looked around warily, but nothing seemed off. Yet. “-You can do anything with redstone, as long as you’re creative about it. These earpieces connect through signals emitted from satellites in the sky, and whatever we input through microphones is sent through those signals and satellites and goes wherever the receiving channel is.”

“...Did you pull that out of your ass?”

She shook her head. So much for ‘proper answer.’ “If you want to think I did, sure.”

If she wasn’t straining her ears, Cassie would have thought the forest was completely empty, but she could swear, if she was standing absolutely still, that something else was walking along with her, but she stopped, listened.

There was nothing there.

The moonlight shining through gaps in the trees was sparse, so there was virtually nothing but instinct for Cassie to rely on in the woods. She knows something else is here with her, it’s not like Stella’s house, she _knows_ somebody else is here.

He seems familiar.

“So… do you know how you got here?”

The girl thought to give him a snarky comment, but decided against it at the last second. “No.”

“No?”

“I don’t. I just woke up.” She hacked away at the oversized leaves in her path, “What about you?”

“Hah.. Same here.”

In the distance, separate from Aiden, she could hear a fire cackling.

“So neither of us know how we got here,” The boy said conclusively. She shrugged, not really concerning herself with their conversation. The clearing trees took her attention, instead. She continued forward, looking between the darkness for the coming light.

“What about before you got here?” He asked after a short while, “Do you remember that?”

For a very brief moment, blue-greens became purple, foreboding and dark, _lonely_ ; axes slashed at invisible enemies and people screamed, leaves ate at her feet and-

“No.”

-the cackling, orange or white?

“I don’t remember anything before that, either.”

Aiden was, naturally, perplexed. “You don’t?”

The wind howled. Cassie took in a deep breath in an effort to stabilize herself.

“I remember jumping off a platform,” She admits, “That’s all.”

Silence.

“Oh.”

He’s smarter than she thought.

He shut up.

Cassie continued through the cluster of trees, now with more moonlight on the path than earlier. Her walk was silent, the only other noise she could hear, besides the forest, being Aiden rummaging through papers and file cabinets in his cramped office. Moving on, she focused on the laughing fire.

At some point in the silent walk, it had gotten so unnerving and stuffy she almost considered starting a conversation herself, or to ask Aiden to shut up and stop ruffling papers in her ear.

Until she found herself in a clearing.

She blinked. “Oh.”

“Why, what’s up?”

“It’s…” Cassie gulped, “It’s a campsite.”

Aiden paused. “A campsite?”

Surrounding a small pile of sticks and stones were chests and blankets bundled in the shape of logs. Wedged in the middle of the campfire was a sword, the hilt facing up. It looked old and used, the cracks in the blade showing even in the darkness.

Cassie’s eyes narrowed and she knelt down to get a better look. The sword was greenish-grey, the hilt decorated with intricate carvings, reaching to the midpoint of the blade. True enough, there were cracks all over it, the thin lines glowing a light orange. Curious, she traced the cracks, but when she did…

She yelled.

The girl was thrown back when the sword spontaneously combusted, and in that moment, everything flashed before her eyes. Sounds, colors, textures, all in an instant, frozen in place and printed to form a complete picture, a set state.

Her screams and the flashing, it all lasted as it came, and the buzzing in her ears for the one second slowly faded away.

“Cassie?”

Everything was muffled for a while and she could barely hear Aiden over the noise crawling to a quiet hum.

“Cassie?” Aiden repeated, “Are you there? Are you okay?”

She blinked, trying to get her bearings and scrambling up to sit. Her breathing was rapid- “Uh- Yeah,” -and _god_ , her head hurt. What did she hit?

She grimaced. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Instead of replying right away, she steadied her breath, her sight focused on the fire in front of her. The dancing, bright orange against the blue around her was… surprisingly calming. She continued to breathe, slowing herself down until she could consider herself okay.

“Pretty sure,” She said finally.

“O-Oh.” Aiden seemed unsure, “Okay, good.”

Satisfied, Cassie looked around her surroundings to get a better idea of where she was. It was a bit of a useless effort, when she found that it was as unremarkable as everything else she’s seen in the past hours; almost like every place was a carbon copy of the other.

That was a usual thing for forests, wasn’t it?

“Do you know what that was?” He asked, “What happened?”

Kneading her forehead, Cassie breathed a laugh. “I have _no_ idea. The thing just blew up in my face and gave me a… a…” She tried to find the word, feeling an ache at the back of her head with a grimace.

“A what?”

It didn’t hurt when she touched it. “A flashbang.” She finished, getting up to sift through the chests, to find a rather surprising amount of useful materials. Glass bottles, used armor, food...

“...A what?”

She stopped. “What do you mean, ‘a what?’”

“What’s a flashbang?”

“You don’t know what a flashbang is?”

“Should I?”

The redhead’s sigh was exasperated. Aiden was far more clueless than Cassie thought, it seems. Deciding to continue her salvage, she opened the chest back up and took everything that had worth. “It’s pretty common knowledge, I think you should.”

“I guess it isn’t that common if I don’t know what it is.” 

She took the weathered leather armor; dug through more of the chest and kept the handful of wrapped vegetables and meat. The iron and wood and stone tools were kept in her inventory as well.

“So what is it?”

_Did he ever stop asking questions?_ Cassie grumbled as she dug through the chest some more. “Short version, it’s a bomb that makes a bright flash of light that blinds the target temporarily.”

“Oh. So that’s what happened to you?”

Cassie’s hands froze when she got to the bottom of the chest; or rather, what was _laying_ at the bottom of it.

“Yeah,” She said dismissively, “So, Aiden.”

“Yeah?”

The rectangular stick in her hands was rather bright, though its silver glow was still faint in comparison to the bonfire and the moon. “Your turn to explain something to me,” she turned the stick over, examining every inch of it. It was in perfectly pristine condition. “Do you know about any sticks that glow?”

“You mean like blaze rods?”

She made a noise. “Well, not exactly like blaze rods. It looks like a longer, thinner iron ingot, only,” Flipping the stick over, she caught it perfectly in her palm and felt it thoroughly. “It’s not iron. It’s kind of translucent and pretty warm.”

“ _Warm?_ ”

Moving on to the other chest and going through that, Cassie found nothing of interest. She looked back down at the stick and sat down. “Just a little.” She yawned, “It’s not like it’s blazing hot or anything.”

Aiden took a while to answer, before giving out a mere, “Huh.”

The glow of the rod faltered, its humming either louder or softer with the light’s changing glow, like a metronome to the tune of a slow amble.

(It felt familiar.)

While still holding the rod, she stifled a yawn, now laying on her back and looking up at the stars.

They weren’t the same as the stars in the other world.

She didn’t know if that was better or worse.

“Getting sleepy?” Aiden asked.

“Mhm.” She rubbed her eyes behind her glasses, “A bit.”

“I bet that fight with Lunacy was exhausting. You should get some rest.”

Faintly in the background, both in and out of transmission, she could hear something; it was low and clunky, somewhat guttural. Whether that was Aiden in the office or another creature in the forest, she didn’t bother to care.

“Yeah, sure.”

* * *

**2**

* * *

When Cassie woke up, she woke to darkness.

The sky was the same as when she went to sleep. Not just in the fact that it was still night, but the moon, the stars, were in the exact same position as before. Nothing had changed, nothing had moved. It was entirely still.

Perhaps she hadn't slept at all. Perhaps she had only blacked out for a second.

"That's bull, it's been eight hours!" Aiden exclaimed.

"Listen," She grumbled, fiddling with the strings of an enchanted bow she found in the chests. "If you've got a problem with that, take it with the sky, not me."

Her disembodied companion let out a heavy sigh. "Sorry."

She only just woke up seconds ago and started fixing the things immediately, thinking it best not to stay in one spot too long for fear of any other monsters like Lunacy finding her. The string quivered back into place, neither it or the wood of the bow affected by Cassie at all. Closing her eyes, she took in a deep breath and looked straight at the little fire before her. "It's fine."

As the sky hadn't changed, so too did the bonfire. It was still as bright as when it was first set, illuminating everything within its vicinity. The sword in the center was undamaged.

She looked back down at the bow in her lap, enchanted with Flame, Knockback, Mending. Its glow was mesmerizing, soft pastels moving between the two ends of the weapon like calm water. A small smile graced itself on her face.

"With that fire," Aiden said, "I'm surprised nobody's tried to eat you yet."

" _Ha Ha._ ”

In the background of the feed, she could hear the sound of papers being flipped, cabinets opening and closing, and the sound of what could be Aiden spinning in an office chair. He must be bored.

(How could he stand staying in that cramped space for so long? She herself couldn't have lasted _minutes._ )

Cassie frowned, remembering everything they've done so far. How long have they known each other, twenty hours? Less?

She remembered him asking if she remembered getting here. _She_ was trapped and starving just before she woke up here, and as far as she knows, the (likely) younger spawn didn't have any form of sustenance in that cramped office. Not unless there was some way out that he hasn't found or told her about yet.

"Hey, Aiden?" Cassie kept the arrow and got up, doing one last check over her inventory.

"Yeah?"

(Was she _concerned_?)

Cassie shook her head, biting her lip.

"What about you?"

"What do you mean, 'what about me?'"

She took her mind off of it. Everything was in place. Deciding against asking for directions in favor of exploration, she turned away from the campfire and headed forward. "Do _you_ remember anything from before you got here?"

She'd asked because she wanted background noise, something to fill her head in the everlasting night that was the forest.

It felt stuffy. Empty, yet cramped. Full, but lonely.

The silence that came with his lack of an answer unnerved her far more than she felt it should have.

"Nothing good," He finally said. A wave of relief and curiosity came over her. A laugh was all she could muster to convey that. "So we're in the same boat, huh?"

Aiden mirrored her perfectly. "Well, maybe I didn't jump off a platform, but I did starve to death in a prison cell."

Starve to death.

Cassie looked down at the wrapped food in her inventory.

"Are you hungry?" She asked in a low voice. Aiden was silent.

"Not really."

And that ended that.

Cassie continued forward, bringing her fingers up to -adjust her glasses- rub her eyes. The forest was far too dark.

"What about prison?" To break the silence.

The gurgles that were Enderman noise weren't enough.

Aiden's voice, though low and hesitant, comforts her. "What about it?"

"You- you had a government? In your world?"

"Oh- us? No. Not my- not my homeworld. I was-" and he stopped.

Cassie's eyes softened, guilt blossomed in her chest, even if he couldn't see it.

He clearly didn't want to talk about it.

"If you don't want to talk about it, it's fine," she says.

Aiden sounds relieved, "Thank you. I'm sorry."

"It's fine. I should be the one apologizing."

So she won't pry.

In truth, Cassie herself is unsure if she would tell him about her own background.

* * *

**3**

* * *

The laughter was too loud.

The cackling of fire, the amble in the forest, the click of the tiles.

Click.

Clak.

Cackle.

_Crack!_

Cassie’s breath hitched.

“Is something wrong?”

Somebody’s here, she could feel it. It prickled at her skin, tickling the hairs that stood on end, sweat beading down her skin and making her even more uncomfortable only standing where she stood.

_Click. Clak. Cackle. Crack._

A needle falling to the floor.

“It’s nothing,” she says, though with a trembling voice.

It’s everyday.

( _Click. Clak. Cackle. Crack._ )

The cell door falls shut.

(It runs through the trees.)

His voice breaks through the noise.

“So what’s your goal here, exactly?”

Cassie takes in a breath. The stone hoe in her hand trembles with her.

She hacks away.

“I don’t know. Find out where I am, I guess.”

Hacked away.

“I wanna know how I got here, *why* I’m here.” She looked down momentarily.

(“And I guess, find out why I’m still alive.”)

“Have you found anything about the world we’re in?”

Aiden shook his head. “No. This whole place is an unorganized mess, I’ve only found profiles of people so far. And.. none of them are really that important, or interesting.”

Cassie frowned. “What about the stick I told you about?”

“Nothing on that either. I’ll let you know, though.”

The metronome was interrupted by a groan. Cassie gulped.

“Thank you.”

Keep walking. Keep walking.

_Click_

The blue-greens look right into her eyes.

Keep walking. Keep Walking.

_Clak_

It fogs up and blinds her.

Keep Walking. Keep Walking.

_Cackle_

The fog grows heavy.

Keep Walking. Keep Walking.

_It doesn’t look like a word anymore, does it?_

Keep walking.

Keep Walking.

“Keep walking!”

**_KEEP WALKING_**

Cassie yelled and slashed at the presence that came up behind her. The hoe torn into weathered skin and spilled blood and guts all over the forest floor. The husk groaned, its pain summoning more of its kind. They ambled for her, hands raised to grab her and drag her in.

She grabbed for the broken enchanted sword and hacked at the walking corpses, tainting the heavier heavier fog with blood and rotten skin, filling the floor with the stench of the dead.

The campfire cackled, louder and louder, as she tore through the horde.

Its embers blended with the Ender’s. The purple and orange burned her.

She saw the Enderman’s eyes and it stared back at her.

It screamed, and so did she.

* * *

**4**

* * *

She was thrown back to the campfire, feeling the flames burn through her sweater and brand her skin, the sword cutting through and slashing at the bruises.

The Enderman teleported to her as she backed away, heaving for breath, still in pain from the outburst of fire. It screeched at her, its forest of eyes piercing her soul, terrifying her to her core. It picked her up once again, cold, crumbling talons piercing her neck; holding her up in the air and tightening its hold.

She choked.

It threw her again to the trees and made the bark scrape her skin. A noiseless scream escaped her, short of breath as she tried to stand and stand up against the barrage of monsters at her steps. She grabbed for the diamond enchanted sword and swung aimlessly, hitting little husks in her way. She continued anyway, stabbing and slashing and ducking out of the way, wincing in pain.

She continues forward.

Hack and slash. Hack and slash.

They burned through her skin, groped at misshapen bruises. The needles hurt.

The needles hurt.

She comes back. The fire burns. The cackling continues.

The screeches never stop.

Black and white. Black and white. _Black and white and blue and green._

_Blue and g **reen.**_

_**Blue and white and purple and black.**_ She learns to ignore the neverending husks. They’re stupid, they’re weak, they’re unimportant.

It’s the Enderman that matters.

It keeps moving and screaming at her.

“MURDERER! MURDERER!”

At some point, it picks her up again, makes her drop her sword. Her hands flail at the surprise, and in that moment, they grab at a cloth. An unfamiliar cloth, an uncomfortable- _leather_ , stained and worn. She grabs it and pulls, and the Enderman screeches.

It throws her to the bushes. The thistles prick at her and stick her to the ground.

“What was that?” She gasps, “What was that?”

Leather. Leather around the neck.

It was a cloth, a full arm of cloth.

She stumbled out of the bushes, landing on the trunk of a tree. Desperately, she climbs up.

“Why is that leather important?” She reaches out.

Climbing up and up until she’s in the branches, and she can see the Enderman stand tall in the spotlight. The flames are licking at his feet, the embers floating high into the air and lighting his skin, his hair, the glare in his eyes, the shadow of his jacket.

It’s tied around his neck.

“What do you see?” “What do you see?”

(“I see a gate.”) “I see an ocelot.”

An ocelot printed at the back of the jacket. It’s bright and smooth and new and pristine, contrasting the old tear of the jacket. Kept as some sort of memento, or the lingering scent of something long gone.

A gate. An ocelot.

Cassie drew out her bow.

Flame. Knockback. Mending.

She pulled out an arrow and drew the bow back. Her eyes narrowed at the Enderman.

The groans of the husks. The cackle of the fire. The howl of the wind. The pinprick sound of a needle laid gently in a tray.

“What do you see?”

Aiden’s breath hitched.

Cassie breathed out evenly, mouth clamped shut.

She let go.

The enderman screamed.

The arrow dug into his skin through a blank leather jacket.

She fired again, and again, and again, and again.

Through blurry eyes, tears turning her vision into a white haze, she fired again and again and again and again.

She sobbed, and gasped, and fired again and _again._

The husks burnt to a crisp. The campfire cackled. The Enderman screamed.

He was on fire, yelling to the moon. He was thrown and pushed back further and further with every shot, spreading the flames to the trees. The forest is alight with his agony, his blond hair matching the fire, the purple embers losing to the falling leaves; the fire’s laughter against the breaking of the branches.

Click. Clak. Cackle.

_Snap._

Cassie fell back into the bushes, pricked and prodded by the needles, eyes blind, skin open red, roses blooming from its cage.

It hurt.

“It hurts so much.”

She could feel a green glow softly nearby, near the light.

But it’s so far.

“Cassie, you need to get up.”

Something flapped, wings, the air was pushed through her.

A creature screamed, or her ears were ringing. Her head ached.

“You need to get up.”

It was gone.

It hurt.

But she pushed herself to move.

The silverfish below her giggled, and the sound echoed in the air. Chiming, jingling.

A merry little tune to die to.

“You can’t die here.”

She limped to the campfire, her sloppy amble smudging the dirt below her.

The fire didn’t laugh at her, this time. It was quiet, and non-judgemental. It sympathized with her, felt what she did without having to say anything.

_Jump._

Dig.

_**Jump.**_

She reached her hand out to the cracked sword, and the moment her finger made contact with the old stone, the fire burst into a giant tree, its leaves disappearing into the air, giant and tall. The knockback made her stumble to the floor, hurting her even more.

The flames became gentle, and soft, and a comforting warm she missed, that she couldn’t get from the tiles or the cold, metal door.

(It’s so stuffy in here.)

“Go to sleep, Cassie.”

Her eyelids drifted closed. Her breathing was small, and steadied.

She saw nothing in the darkness, then surrendered to it whole.

* * *

**5**

* * *

“What happened? What did you see? Are you okay?”

She laid herself on the ground, staring up at the sky, free of embers and lit only with the quiet white stars in the sky.

“That leather jacket,” she murmurs quietly. “What was that?”

Aiden was quiet for a moment. She held out on the hope of the conversation.

He isn’t gone.

“Remember how you said- how you asked me about prison?”

Cassie bit her lip. “Yeah?”

“I burned a city to the ground.”

He lost a friend he used to trust with everything. The person he trusted with his life, his love, left him, abandoned him, and let him down. Aiden wouldn’t admit to the other man’s fault, but Cassie could tell.

He was left behind. So he retaliated.

It was knee-jerk, he said, and then denied. He struggled to admit it all. He stole a portal key and took over an entire city and burned it to smithereens.

They arrested him, in the end, and he was thrown into prison.

Solitary confinement.

And then he woke up here.

“It’s not so bad,” he says. “It’s not as bad in here. I have you to talk to, it’s not… lonely. It’s not _as_ lonely, as- as prison was."

A frown formed on her face. “You couldn’t even see your other friends in prison?”

He shook his head. “No. They made sure I was all alone.”

…

Cassie breathed evenly, relaxing her muscles, watching the unmoving sky.

It was quiet, tonight. The most peaceful she’s ever felt in a long while.

It won’t last, and it’s not 100% peace and quiet.

But at the moment, it was enough.

Fumbling with the cold silver rod in her pocket, Cassie Rose let out a resigned, quiet sigh. “Yeah,” she says softly, “I can get that.”


	3. The Lonely Anniversary Feast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have No Patience and i am Very Upset *fuckin* ao3

**0**

* * *

They never let me do anything fun.

I was never allowed anywhere without supervision. I had no books, no toys, no television, no playmates, no nothing.

It was just me, and the doctors, and the laboratory.

Every day, they performed experiments on me. They injected things into me and stuck me with wires and needles. They tore me apart and put me back together again. Then when they were done, they put me back in that cell with nothing to do.

It was boring, and even sad, sometimes, but I had papa with me. Papa was the most nice to me. He always treated me gently and comforted me when the pain of the experiments was too much.

I love Papa. I want to make papa happy.

When papa told me, “Never be like Cassie Rose,” I had no idea what he meant, but I wanted to please him anyway.

I try my best not to be whoever this “Cassie Rose” is.

One day, I asked papa who Steve and Alex were, because I saw them in my dreams.

I was locked up in a dark cell immediately after, all alone, with no food or water or light. I could hear the doctors arguing even behind bedrock walls. They’re all mad, and afraid; but I know Papa is pleased with me. I made papa proud, and as long as papa is happy with me, that’s all I’ll ever need.

Cassie Rose watches from the other side of the glass. Displeasure is evident in her eyes, but it’s blocked by fogged lenses; and she walks away, leaving me alone in my cell.

We cackle like fire through our acid tears.

* * *

**1**

* * *

Time is a fickle thing in this world.

“How long did it take me to kill the Enderman?” Cassie would think, “Did it take me minutes? Was it hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years?”

The moon never changed, the stars never moved; all that did was the fire and the blurry numbers, rising and rising with every moment she blinked. She’d hacked and slashed at the husks, slicing and dicing their rotten intestines and flesh to pieces and letting them drop to the pool of old blood on the floor; and even that was gone. The soil beneath her was dry and rocky, pebbles scattered like chocolate chips in a cookie.

When she closed her eyes, the dark wood was replaced by white walls. The satisfaction resonated with pride at a prize.

It all only stopped when she finally focused on the Enderman, and ignored the searing pain that tore at her and made her head ache. And from there, everything moved once more. The wind blew, the trees swayed, the leaves rustled in the air and the Enderman cried. And even Cassie herself moved. Her lips twitched upwards, her chest heaved for breath, her bloody hands nearly let the sword slip.

For a moment, she could smile.

Then it faded away when she heard the fire breathe, an ember cracking from the stone and wood and jumping out of the bonfire. It cracked.

(In her inventory, the drop of Lunacy felt lonely.)

“He was your friend, wasn’t he?” Cassie murmured. “The Enderman I killed.”

The blonde faced her from the other side of the glass, purple embers floating around him, erratic, yet lazy. His dead eyes looked nowhere, pupils gone, focus nonexistent. He was nothing but a husk of a man long gone. A poor facsimile of something precious to this world.

To the boy at the other side.

Aiden had hesitated, breathing in, trembling. “Yeah,” he said. “He was.”

Lukas, the architect of the New Order of the Stone.

His blond hair had been sullied, tangled with dirt and leaves and soil and blood. His skin flaked with cold, sticky, black matter; purple bled from luminescent innards. With the way his flesh rot and fell to the floor, his blue eyes melting into tears that disappeared in an Enderman’s suit; he was better suited to the table. To have his chest be forced open. To find a green, lonely, ball, glowing but giving no light, futile in its existence and persistence; it rests in his chest, in his heart, in his lungs. It was perfect for a vivisection.

The tools were right there.

And there were more, too. Three more tables, until a locked door, leading to the cells; looking like a prison in an otherwise professional setting, for a prison is more suited to the ragged, harsh suffering of a deserving convict.

She supposed, with Aiden by her side, that the prison failed at fulfilling even that, when it kept people who didn’t fit the criteria completely.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. He smiled, though it seemed forced.

“It’s fine.” Aiden assured with a humorless chuckle, “He wasn’t giving you any chances, anyway. Those husks ambushed you before you could do anything about it.”

The words made her feel warm and almost made her melt into some comforting reassurance, but she still felt tense in the rock hard shell. Was that displeasure seeping into her chest? Was that upset bubbling inside her?

It was like a long lost friend returning in a different form, yet somehow falling back into routine.

It wasn’t welcome.

She glared at it, at the meek girl on a chair, her sparkling, pristine, white dress blowing in the nonexistent wind. Her dark hair covered one of her green eyes, the other glistening in the light with tears that prickled at the edges; her lip trembled, her fingers clutched the sides of the monobloc with green veins.

“Papa… Papa…” the favorite mumbled, and it rocked back and forth in its chair, longing for somebody who will never stay.

A beetle the size of her hand buzzed against the window.

(It sounded like needles.)

She could still feel it even when she looked away and covered her ears. She shouldn’t be surprised.

Cassie should know.

Even if she gauges her eyes out, she knows where the beetle is, because she remembers.

Even if she ruptures her ear drums, she knows what the beetle sounds like, because she remembers.

Even if she blows her brains out and tears it to pieces, and her blood pools where it flew, and the cold becomes colder, and the dark becomes darker.

The lights still flicker. The heat still comes and goes.

The moon still glitches in the unmoving sky.

Because she remembers. Her happiness and sadness and anger- it all remains; her disembodied soul under the spotlight of the two moons.

(The plastic dahlia in the vase wilted and drooped, and the petals that fell became wet with dew and blood, and they, damaged, broken, formed a mosaic rose.)

She bears it and moves on, holding tightly to Aiden’s hand.

* * *

**2** ****

* * *

“So I’ve organized everything I’ve found so far.”

“Have you?”

Cassie to walk through the woods, finding her interest piqued when the path slowly turned into mycelium, and mushrooms lined the winding space between the trees.

“In the best way that I can. Everybody I recognize goes in one side of my desk, and everybody I don’t gets dumped back onto the floor.”

She rolled her eyes. “How efficient.”

“Look, there’s nothing really extraordinary in here, okay?” He said defensively, “They’re all profiles so far; honestly, I think they’re all just copies of each other.” 

Looking around, Cassie could see giant mushrooms between the trees. The purple grass spread as far as she could see.

Seeing nothing, she moves on. “What makes you say that?”

“They’re all just,” Aiden grumbles, “This person is this age, this gender, blablablablabla, did _this_ and _that_ before ‘The Virus,’ and now they’re _this_!” He waved papers around in the office, babbling, annoyed, at the repetition. Cassie couldn’t help but chuckle.

When she stopped and continued her trek, eyes searching for any sign of a fire, or even life, she asks, “What about this virus?”

“What about it?”

“I mean-” Cassie sighed, “What _is_ it? It’s everywhere on those files, isn’t it?”

Silence, in the forest and the audio.

She frowned, “Isn’t it?”

“...Yeah.”

Cassie stood for breath in the forest, standing on the purple grass, alone and cold in the humid air, uncomfortable in the dark. Shadows loomed from under the large mushrooms and the trees, light peeking in through the leaves, making faces that danced in the swaying wind.

And she was alone.

“What’s the virus and what the fuck did it do to this place?” She wondered.

Aiden stayed in the silence with her. His eyes rested on the files spread on the desk, faces he did and didn’t know paper clipped to objectifying papers. They were stacked together like meaningless numbers, subjects and data that he couldn’t understand.

There was nothing, for awhile, nothing but her breathing.

In the cold air.

He took in a deep, harrowing breath. “I don’t know.”

The world is nothing as she walks. Everywhere around her is dark, just different shades of black. It looks as if the scale of the colors slides wherever she looks, as if she’s in a world of one palette, one color.

It blurs all around her, a haze, a fog that messes with her eyes, her vision warping.

It’s repeating and repeating.

Only several kilometers traveled later, biomes upon biomes, mycelium and mesas and swamps and jungles; Cassie finally finds another campsite. It sits in a forest of tall trees, although it took several moments of staring to even _realize_ it was a campsite. The place was completely ransacked, logs ripped to shreds and chests scratched, some of them even stuck closed, with moss growing over the locks and water rusting them tight. She’d scratched her skin and bled when she tried to force one open.

“Ah!”

“Are you okay?” Aiden asked immediately, alert upon her yelp.

She seethed at the wound, and glared at the red that dripped down to the rotten soil; a piece of metal was stuck to her skin.

“Yeah,” she said, as she readied to tear the scrap out, “I’m fine.”

“Are you su-”

Cassie pulled it out and screamed, and she fell, and when her back hit the sword in the middle of the campsite, she felt like her voice was torn out of her throat.

The scrap of the lock fell.

Her back burned.

Embers flew to the air as she collapsed to the wood and rolled to the side, feeling the metal pressed to her thigh as she stumbled, and she couldn’t even catch a breath until she was stopped by a stuck log; and she trembled, and she burned.

Cassie tried, _tried_ to get up, and she did with weak arms, but she turned and looked behind her; and where she expected to see the fire, she instead saw eight red, red, red eyes looking back at her, sparkling in the night and giggling with ecstasy.

“Oh, you poor thing.”

In that instant, she saw everything, but it was tinted in red.

And the number rose by a single digit.

And she was there again. Her back burned anew, the wound fresh and bleeding, her thigh pressed to the lock; and she got up, and she looked, and the grinning eyes again. And again. Like some sort of dream on loop; another number, another.

Collapse. Burn. Bleed.

Get up.

_And run._

By the third digit, she ran, sprinted without ever looking back; and as she tried to comprehend her rapid breaths and the blood pounding in her ears and her head throbbing and her hand bleeding, laughter rang through the air, startling the leaves and pushing the trees against each other, waving with the rushing air that blew past her ears.

A rhythmic series of stomps followed suit.

And the eyes laughed.

_**“Stop running, murderer."**_ The monster reprimanded. She sounded as if she was disappointed in Cassie, expecting what was happening and displeased by it. _**“Running isn’t the most efficient thing to do in this instance, you might as well surrender!”**_

Its voice rang through her head like some sort of drone, choking and gurgling in a robotic tone; it filled the air as if filtered through speakers, similar to Lunacy; only, far, far worse.

(Perhaps it was worse because she recognized the voice.

It felt jarring hearing it like that, like through a machine filter, like she was actually in control.)

Cassie kept running, even as she had no idea how far she was from the creature.

That must have been her mistake as she missed the stomping rising in volume and closing in distance, and only realized too late as she was impaled that the loud noises were footsteps, and the thing that pierced her was a leg; and everything around her faded as her innards were filled with string and redstone and the leg pulled out, and the leg was a _knife_ , the leg of a spider, one of eight that belonged to the monster that grinned down at her. She blacked out before she could hear Tarantula mock her death.

When her back burned, she ran again.

The numbers rose, as she ran and ran and fell and died, and the giant spider of redstone that followed her and killed her that was Tarantula caught up to her and killed her once more. Over and over, no matter what path she took.

Nevertheless, Cassie kept running.

“I’m trying to find a way out,” Aiden reassured her when she asked again. “Just keep running.”

So she did.

**_“You know, Cassie, it would be very beneficial if you just joined my web.”_**

Keep running.

Through the trees, the swamp, the sand, the mycelium. Her head and heart were pounding, blood rushing, it felt like her skin was pulsing with the heat, wet with sweat and the humid air.

It was so hard to breathe.

**_“Your mental state would improve vastly- and by that, I mean you would have no mental state to worry about.”_**

Keep running.

“I’m trying, Cassie!”

“Please!” She cried, right before she was impaled again. The girl woke up, burning, and her throat felt sore and scratched as she ran and ran and ran again.

_**“You wouldn’t even have to worry about anything anymore.”**_

More numbers. More running. Constricted lungs. Chest heaving.

Her back was numb, even though the burn was fresh.

_**“I would be here to listen to you. WE would be here to listen to you.”**_

Was it?

**_“My web is one big, happy family. We NEVER leave anyone behind!”_**

“Cassie-”

_**“Isn’t that what you want? Didn’t you kill innocent people because of your abandonment issues?”**_

“Turn right.”

**_“Don’t you want a family again?”_**

Collapse. Burn. Bleed.

She turned in Aiden’s direction and sprinted away, catching Tarantula off-guard.

And this time, things were different.

She’d passed by trees, as she did all her previous attempts, but now there was rubble; now there were things to avoid. Things to avoid, because they were broken, and split into pieces. Pieces that blocked the road.

The road that led to a rundown town.

The predator far behind, her heart racing, her limbs weak; Cassie slid into a shed and breathed heavily against abandoned scrap, lying against dried blood and a clutter of bones.

“Tarantula,” the name she repeated like a mantra with her breath, “Tarantula.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied as she took out her axe and bow, “Aiden, I need you to look for a file on a ‘Tarantula.’ Hurry.”

She peeked through the cracks in the wall, looking out for the spider. “I know nothing about her.”

“I’m on it,” Aiden said. He’d moved to retrieve a file, but paused.

“Cassie?”

The spider laughed.

“Please be careful.”

**_“I know this place very well, you know.”_**

Cassie’s breath hitched.

Tarantula entered her home, arms spread wide and in preparatory stance. Her several eyes scanned the area, every visible part of town reviewed and dissected within seconds; the ~~graffiti~~ art, the disrepair, the web, were all in perfectly pristine shape.

Except… for one…

Her human head whipped to the dead shed nearby, and she cackled.

**_“I win!”_**

She found Cassie in no time and tore her apart! Just as quickly as she did so, she chuckled as she picked up her remains and stitched them together again; soon enough, the toolshed smelled of fresh blood and redstone.

10,652,774.

Cassie gasped as she bolted upwards and ran.

* * *

**3**

* * *

Cassie realizes, on 10,652, 787, that she can do nothing but keep running. When it comes to Tarantula, there is no hiding or direct attack, just running and running and running, running away from her predator, running away from her problem.

In a way, it’s reflective of the monster herself. Running in the House of Mirrors, through the reflective halls, rejecting the dark and the light under a hazy hue. Running, running, running away, yet making no escape.

She couldn’t do anything else.

But could she?

“Why is she running?” As she weaves through the abandoned village.

“Who is she running from?” As Aiden scours the office.

“Can she ever stop?” As her legs burn in the freezing winds.

It’s on 10,652,800 that Cassie realizes what she needs to do.

On 10,652,788, she ran through more redstone dust than rotten flesh. The smell of burning, flakey copper filled her nose and fooled her. It mixed with the soil and the blood into some ridiculous amalgamation of shit. Nevertheless, it lit up beneath her feet. It flew when she scraped it with her shoe, when she ran. The clouds of dust behind her were red and brown, and they did nothing to affect Tarantula.

On 10,652,790, she was parched and had nothing to drink. Her throat was dry, lips cracked, and her head was numb. Hazy, foggy, she needed to lay down and _sleep_ \- no, she needed to drink. She needed water. She was weak, lightheaded, breathing, she needed to drink, she needed water. Yet there was none. Parched, dehydrated, exhausted, she was caught and killed.

On 10,652,795, she found death fill an entire clearing of sandstone and netherrack. It lay all over the place, limp and withering, wasting away. It rot and stunk the air, left its mark as some sort of permanent reminder of its existence. Death stuck there like a disobedient _rat_ , a sentimental toy that a stubborn, arrogant, little girl would keep despite orders.

On 10,652,796, she realized the netherrack was actually redstone, and the dead bodies were actually dolls. They were carcasses kept in pristine, perfect condition. Porcelein, cloth, felt; a decoration, not only to be admired, but to be used as well. She couldn’t stay there for long to see how or why, but they scared her enough to still and distract her from Tarantula’s blade.

On 10,652,797, Cassie found the strings that held the puppets together. The redstone, the restored town, the bodies- they were Tarantula’s web. Admired for beauty, used for everything else. They were her food, yet also her family. It was a sick, twisted mechanism. A home or routine the monster built all for herself, to _sustain herself; it’s how she’s still alive. Still living._

On 10,652,799, Cassie realized she was being chased by an abandoned little girl.

When she turned around and let herself die, she came face to face with the warrior in blue and gold, wild orange hair held together under a helmet, and blood, blood, bloody red eyes crying her weakness: as she stabbed her through the abdomen and created another puppet, as she pushed them away, she begged for her father to come back.

This time, Cassie ran, wielding a sword to a well, moving through the trees and out of Petra’s reach.

She didn’t stop running, so few seconds were used to chop the trees to pieces. She ran as she converted them into blocks. She ran as she turned those blocks into a crafting table. She ran through the jungle and the swamp, and ignored the satisfaction she felt when she heard Tarantula scream; ignored the satisfaction as she broke the silver rod into three.

One second, put the block down.

Second second, lay the broken pieces.

Third second, take the bucket.

Fourth second,

run.

Chasing the white dress, the moon, flying between the trees. Cassie ran until she reached the mycelium once again, and when she reached the shore, she ducked and filled the bucket with water.

Within a moment’s notice, she was sprinting back where she came once again. This time she climbed up a tree and ran from there, jumped from tree to tree and avoiding Tarantula’s wrath. The woman-spider snarled and growled, grumbled under her breath at her elusive prey. She jumped high above her, out of her reach, always just a second or a step away.

Cassie knew she reminded her of a dragon.

So she flew

Back through the biomes, swinging from vines to branches and jumping, running away just before it cracked and fell under her weight. Away, away.

Then, against Petra’s expectations, she jumped off, right back into the fire.

Her back burned this time. Twice. Twice now, it burned, and Cassie could feel it; but she ignored it.

She turned right.

Right, to the village in disrepair. Broken, abandoned, once thriving but now dead and gone and forgotten. Used, thrown-away at the turn of the century, reduced to ash after being left alone, alone. A home nobody truly cared for.

The long road ahead of her, the decay strewn around her.

Left unchecked, stayed like that for years, never cleaned up and never fixed. Left like it was put on display in a musuem.

A path of sentimentality.

She ran to the netherrack, the sandstone, the red, and Tarantula was right behind her. Stood at ten feet and angry and strong, yet dumb enough to not know what to do with her own strength, too stupid and weak to even keep her friends close.

“Focus, Cass,” Aiden reminded her.

There’s so much you could do with just one bucket of water.

She built up, straight up, with weak wood, and when she was high enough she brought out the bucket and poured.

The redstone glowed

and the next second, darkness took over.

* * *

**4**

* * *

She could see in the dark all the shadows that cowered before her.

They hated her, and she hated them. They haunt her and mock her, pushing her down and kicking her, tearing her to bits. Like little silverfish, like cave spiders that crawl from beyond her sight and up her leg.

They nip at her feet. They tear her apart.

They refuse to look into the mirror, the light, because if they did, she would see her own face.

She and they cowered before them and her.

In specks of white, in which not even the light is immune to the dark, bright green eyes that stare back and smile, “You’ll always be alone.”

They could be Jesse’s eyes, but hers were never green.

* * *

**5**

* * *

Nothing is immune to the darkness, not even the red in Tarantula’s eyes. Whether blood or redstone, it doesn’t glow- it is. It is the dark, is with the dark.

It thinks, therefore it is.

Hiding beneath your skin and flowing through your veins; hiding underneath the floor and leading you into a trap.

It is.

With the puppets disabled and almost everything gone, with the redstone spider weakened, Cassie brings out her sword and axe; and she jumps.

The woman sticks the landing through the water and runs through the small flood pooling around them, straight to the agonized spider. It yells and flails, swings aimlessly and screams, thrashing, but its efforts are useless.

Cassie smiles at how stupid it is.

She slashed at its legs and cuts them off, and the blood _pours_ , it spouts. Cassie doesn’t mind it staining as she continues.

Slice, dice.

She cuts the spider’s legs, she slashes through its body and lets the blood spurt out, spill her guts and tear the string from her heart. One by one.

All bark and no bite.

The facade melts away, washed by the water.

The silence falls when her head falls to the ground, and her eight eyes are doused, drowned under the blood-stained water.

The lights still flicker.

The dust around her spreads. The moon freezes, out of sight.

And Cassie is exhausted.

Her knees buckle under her and she collapses. So tired, so hot, _burning_ from the inside out. She breathes, her chest hurts, her back moreso. Her weapons drift in the water as she lets go, exhausted, uncomfortable.

A yellow ball glows warmly, softly, hovering above the floor, the only light anywhere near her. Then, just as Cassie comprehends it, as she sees it, time slows down.

The soul is taken by the wind. The flap of wings that fly by, the air that billows her hair and the trees and the leaves through the wind. The dragon screams, and so does she, or she feels to as it rings in her ear and makes her head throb. It made everything hurt and ache so, so much; far more, far worse than it already did.

Her eyes widened.

The dragon glared back

And just like that, silence fell, a hush came over. The dragon, the soul, and the light are gone.

The girl is left alone with discarded, abandoned armor; blue and yellow, white and gold. The darkness stands by, staring into the soul of the green eyes.

She will be alone. She is abandoned. She was forgotten.

Gone.


	4. Bad Dream

**0**

Before her was a dragon the size of the moon, black and shadow-less. Its scales twitched in waves as it breathed, highlighted by hues of different colors glowing around it in a rhythm she couldn’t hear, rippling out beneath the dragon’s feet like circles.

The colors came and went.

The dragon couldn’t see her; it had no eyes, despite what its appearance would have one believe. It couldn’t hear her, either, because it had no ears to let it.

It had a mouth, but it couldn’t speak.

That didn’t matter, though; she could hear its screams just fine by herself.

It breathed and growled, its chest rumbled with every breath. Even a single twitch from it would shake the earth beneath them.

“We’re both broken, aren’t we?” Cassie says under her breath.

Aiden laughs humorlessly.

The dragon’s image subsides until she’s left alone again in the woods, in the dark. And for awhile, there was nothing; no light, no noise.

Then yellow eyes opened to stare directly at her, black pupils a thin line like a gash over the pool of sickly, yellow pus.

A ringing, a bell, a siren, a horn.

Alarm.

A can of coffee falls with a clatter to the bottom of the rack, and Cassie pushes the plastic flap open to pick it up. The cold drink in her hands, she smiles, wrapped up in a coat and a sweater and her beloved beanie; and she opens the can and takes a sip with a satisfied smile.

It’s cold here, but Cassie has gotten used to these sorts of temperatures a long time ago. They give her an excuse to wrap herself up in layers and not be questioned.

(Anything to stop the needles and injections from piercing her skin and tearing her open and-)

She clutches the can with a tight grip, one that makes her skin scream at the burning cold.

Freezing.

She turns away and walks towards the benches, seats herself down and downs the can of coffee, until but a single sip is left. She rests it with her hands on her lap and sits still.

All alone in the subway, Cassie waits ~~anxiously~~ patiently for the next train.

...Faint voices fill the air.

Faint, foreign words, distant and muffled by the fog; but she can hear them as clear as day.

Songs, games, shows; but she tries to block them out, and tells herself, “They’re just words.” Words, words, just words. Just strings of sounds and superficial meanings.

She blocks them out. She shuts her eyes and covers her ears and curls in on herself and shuts them out,

(They aren’t real if you don’t let them be.)

yet they persist.

As a ringing in her ears - loud, soft - they numb her head, yet that makes it hurt for her all the more. She feels dizzy and unwell, and sick even though the weather and the temperature is fine.

But she burns inside, and it pushes hot tears out of her and grasps her eyes with a pressure she can’t escape.

There’s no poster to distract her.

Nothing to ease the pain.

(The can of coffee spills to the floor and shatters into a million pieces)

And they all stare at her

she can see them, even without eyes  
hear them, even without ears  
feel them, even if she’s not real

(“I _am_ real!” She cries, but nobody is there to really hear.

Nobody listens)

She’s dying and withering away on the spot.

The woman never notices that she’d been moved to the inside of the train until she’s thrown against a pole, as the train takes off and zips speedily through the tunnels.

* * *

**1**

Cassie Rose forces open the door in front of her and sees a man in a purple suit talking to a limp shadow.

“The four most unreachable people,” he says with a smug, accomplished tone to his voice, evident in his body language, in his eyes; even if they’re blocked by dark shades, (even if she’s facing cement walls). “And they’re all in the palm of my hand.”

Then the doors shut closed, and she falls, stumbles backwards to another open door; hissing open and letting in the rushing, dirty air; as the subway continues to move without stopping, without slowing.

Like clouds to a city in the sky.

She sees a boy there, a boy in green. He stands, admiring the architecture around him.

He is just like everybody. He is just like nobody.

And she can’t tell, does his name start with A? R? S? I? A different letter entirely, or no letter at all? Does he even have a name?

She doesn’t want to know.

The boy in green admires the scenery around him, even as it quickly devolves into old flames. They burn in the freezing cold.

And just like that, it’s gone, and she's left suffocated, halted, freezing in the damp air of a made-up mansion. Soon, even that is gone to flickering channels and hijacked broadcasts, and the white, erroneous, static snow becomes pinpricks that pick at the edges.

They become spiders, silverfish, endermites, needles.

They crawl up her back  
They pierce her skin  
They tear her apart and she’s left to put herself back together again

Back together in a trapped mansion

Back together in a grimy forest

Back together in lava and ice, in obsidian and netherrack; back together, choking among the prismarine and suffocating in the water

Drowning, drowning, drowning with the Endermen, with the monsters;

Yet she’s still so alone.

All alone.

The snakes come to bite the fear away, but even those shrivel up from corruption and turn on her.

(She’s not real.)

It’s a losing battle, she realizes, stuck inside this bubble that she can’t escape. Not even she is immune to the strings and the words as she screams and cries against her will, for her will.

It hurts.

Her head hurts.

As she lays in the subway train, that never relents as it speeds past the tunnels and the cities and the water and the skies; she realizes that even with all the power in the world, you can never be immune to everything.

You live.

You think,

(You are sentient,)

Therefore, you are-

“I am…”

A monster

A toy

An experiment

_A character_

She’s fake in every aspect and she knows this. The subway train isn’t real and she knows this.

Olivia stands over her, as Paranoia, as Phobia, as whatever iteration or nickname you may insist on calling her; but it’s all the same, in the end.

303.

She looks down at you, at me, at her, at him; the knife or a gun or a mantelpiece or a walkman in her hands

with a deathgrip.

And she’s gone from sight before Cassie can do anything

But she’s everywhere

Cassie roams the endless tunnel, through the waves of lights, as the shadows from the bars wash over the prisoners kept unjustly inside; as they watch with unnatural, glowing red eyes

\- Olivia’s there, watching -

As the angels soar with false elytron, corrupted and infectious, and poisoning everything they touched; as their strings tighten; as the puppeteer smiles, entertained; as she watches everything through the tears, through their eyes

\- the fear is there, ever present -

As different media mesh and destroy each other and become something anew out of each other’s rotten remains; as files get lost, as perceptions are tainted; as the poison air suffocates and swallows you whole

\- the immortality of memory -

David is pushed into the waters and he drowns.

 _She_ drowns.

Cassie drowns in the sheets that cut off her air, that make everything hot and uncomfortable, that wrap around her in a cocoon and take her away from home.

“I found another one,” she can hear faintly, “It spawned as we released the virus. I think it’ll be useful.”

She screams and begs to go home, but nobody listens. She is silenced and bound and made-up to be someone else. Surrounded by masks, she’s given one herself and has to act among inflated egos; and she can never escape that.

They watch the statistics, the feedback, the readings, the translations; and they mutter to themselves and they plan their next ten hundred steps and they prepare knives to stab each other in the back to get there.

She sits alone as they do this, put aside, moving aside; because she has no one to betray.

They never mind her.

They receive their trophies, their prizes, their awards, their recognition; but it’s all shallow.

She knows this.

Cassie knows this.

She knows that she hates it.

Yet she yearns for it anyway. For an acceptance or camaraderie, or any semblance of a life that she can live in peace, that she can live at all-

But it’s beyond her.

Always so far away, always out of reach

Impossible

Even if she can find the door to it, even as she reaches the end of the train and can see the door to the cockpit, to the driver’s; she can’t open it. It can’t be broken down or beaten or lockpicked. Through it, yes, she can see. She can always see. She can see herself, happy and innocent, but she can’t have it.

She can’t live it.

Because even as somebody with all the power in the world, she is still weak, and she isn’t immune to everything.

“Cassie?”

She blocks it out, because she knows it’s not real.

(He’s elsewhere. She doesn’t deserve him.)

Thinking about Aiden watching her and reaching a hand out to help her breaks her into sobs. She sinks into the floor, swallowed by the matter, all alone as just another corpse.

* * *

**2**

The girl thanks the nonexistent force of gods that she isn’t native to the worlds with functioning prisons; because she doesn’t think she can stand a physical version of her mind.

She sits in front of him, he who sits limp in a cell he was unjustly shoved into. “I’m sorry,” they both say; but Olivia is skeptical of how sincere they actually are.

However, she has no doubt about how similar they are.

They both wanted to go back home.

They both missed somebody.

They both were imprisoned by the fruits of Project:EPSILON.

Faraway, the dragon watches the tableau of loneliness, keeping silent to the truth.

(“It’s okay,” Olivia reassures him. Her voice, coming not out of her mouth, but manifesting out of placebo, echoes through the air; sounds as if it were transmitted through a tunnel, “It’s all of us.”

She holds the dragon in her arms lovingly and hums a lullaby. “We’ll be home soon.”)

Cassie Rose holds Aiden’s hand, but it’s gone as soon as she can comprehend the sensation - not that he’d left, but he simply disappeared, flickered out of existence - and she’s left dumbfounded, struck by grief and helplessness.

“We’ll be home soon.”

She sees him before, enjoying time with a blond man, both wearing the leather jacket she recalled the Enderman having before.

For a reason she can’t explain, she has the urge to suffocate the blond and watch him struggle. To watch him writhe and beg and die reaching for release, for mercy, for forgiveness.

Holding a white pumpkin mask in her hands, she doesn’t resist.

* * *

**3**

They gave her the name Cassandra.

She is never sure why they did, though; because wasn’t Cassandra the woman that nobody believed? Wasn’t that woman cursed? Was it because she did something wrong? Had she lied to somebody?

At the time, she didn’t understand. Whether she repressed the memory or never knew it in the first place is a truth she would keep to herself.

But there was one thing she was sure of her whole life and beyond: Cassandra was not her name. She _hated_ that name, it _wasn’t_ _her_. Rose, Rosanna, felt like she’d been completely overwritten, into a white, blank sheet of nothing; and they used it for data and research and experimentation.

They dehumanized it and gave it a silly, ignorant pet name.

Even the smallest form of care given to her was tainted by heartlessness; but of course, she didn’t care for that, she held onto it with a delusional death grip that could and would kill.

She stands in the middle of a highway. It’s empty, despite the sounds of traffic she can hear at the back of her head.

The orange street lamps and the dark shadows of night are all that let her see. She sees movement in between blinks and flickers, and she deludes herself, childishly, into thinking they looked like anything.

Like a fool, she pretends she’s a little girl, walking home with her father. “Daddy, look, kitties!” She’d squeal and point, and maybe she’d managed to let go, this time, and chase the calico shadows weaving through traffic.

Maybe she’d get caught, by either her father or a pair of headlights.

Maybe she’d catch up to the cat.

Maybe she’d name it-

* * *

**4**

Maybe she’d wake up.

“Stop,” she pleads.

(The researcher ignores her and holds her tighter. “Relax,” he instructs in a dead voice. She thinks it’s counter-productive, as he holds her like this, but she tries to anyway. She fails. The needles sticks itself into her vein, through the inside of her elbow; and she fails to stifle a scream.)

Olivia stands over her, on top of the subway platform; looking down with indecipherable, sickening yellow eyes. Her blanket, her clothes, and her long twintails fly in the cold and dry wind of the tunnels; as the tube trains rush through without pause.

“Even if I did, the nightmares won’t ever stop,” she said in her faraway, echoing voice. “You and I know this from experience, isn’t that right? We both know our fears like the back of our hands. We wear them like our skin.”

The sirens blared, getting louder and louder, ringing in her ear and digging themselves into the depths of her skull.

“They’re a drug we had no say in administering,” as the hustle of faceless crowds and the low murmurs of the scientists made her vision fuzzy, “We’re stuck with this from our first breath to the deletion of our souls.”

(As if she didn’t hear her “friend” talk shit about her, the girl sits at the opposite side of the station, facing away. Her raven hair blows in the wind.)

Even now, she’s still so scared.

Cassie sits in the subway, alone on a plastic, graffitied, cracked bench. The empty and crumpled can of coffee lays in her open palms. They sweat and bleed despite the cold, the blood seeps through her clothes, taints her soul.

The train going home arrives at the station. It slows to a stop.

The doors open.

They wait.

“I want papa,” Rosanna cries. She devolves into sobs and hunches over the broken can, and she cries. Her vibrant red hair falls from her shoulders and cover her eyes from sight, cover the tears that fall.

Her glasses fall to the floor with a sickening crack, as if actual bones broken.

“I want to go back home.”

She’s a little girl lost in the winding tunnels, looking for a way home. She’s a little girl lost and scared of the loneliness of the empty stations, the nightmarish lifelessness of abandonment.

She’s a little girl lost, and the different blood on her hands are the results of poor excuses.

“I just want to go home.”

* * *

**5**

“I knew everything would come back to bite us in the ass,” Hadrian said under his breath. He looked at his sister beneath his long, unruly hair. She sat opposite to him, looking away with her arms folded across her stupidly bright, purple suit.

For awhile, Amelia says nothing, which he came to expect over years of knowing her. Hell, he’d known it even before that; the two were tethered together, after all.

“Will you ever shut up about that?” She asks to the dead air.

Around them lay the withering skeletons of the zombie-sized chickens, their dead meat stacked in the pair’s massive inventories. Occasionally, Hadrian would catch chicken-sized zombies instead of animal skeletons roaming around at the corner of his eye, but he’s sure they were never truly real to him or his sister.

“No,” he finally said bitterly, “I don’t think I will.”

Amelia sighed and turned her head in the other direction, adjusting herself as she unbuttoned her suit.

Her dark eyes met mine. They were familiar to me, I knew them by heart.

They looked just like- exactly like her brother’s.

I guess that should be obvious with a pair of identical twins.


	5. Introspective Providence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is so fcking long im so sorry

**0**

In that new world, Stampy was the first person to ever give her a hug.

She broke down that day because of it and never explained why, in part because she didn’t _know_ why. Not back then. It was a mystery to her, as if she’d lost her memory and had no idea who she was. Something she needed to know, that was integral to her, to her whole identity; but she couldn’t put it to words.

Now, though, as she stares at the little fire before her, she understands the reason for her tears.

Rose couldn’t trust him. He didn’t know her, not really. Those six months of knowing each other meant nothing, no matter what he or the other idiots thought. He was a complete stranger still, one who had no business offering her any sort of affection or sympathy. Cassie knew what came of things like that. They were empty words, actions that held no sentiment. He wanted to gain something from her, all of them did.

She didn’t want to grant them that chance.

...Aiden was different.

They’d both gone through the same things. She understood him like he understood her. They were connected in that way. Kindred spirits.

Today, lonely as she was in the vast forest, Cassie yearned for an opportunity to hug him, as cheesy or stupid as that might sound. Yearning for a human warmth, for some sort of affection that wasn’t just her deriving something from a cat’s actions, for _something_.

The emptiness she was stuck in suffocated her. She blocked her ears and closed her eyes.

(She imagined him to be taller. Maybe not too tall, but enough that she could bury herself in a warmth she could actually relate to, something she could actually trust with herself. _His leather jacket would be a nice contrast to her cotton hoodie, perhaps,_ she thinks with a humorless laugh under her breath.

Aiden was good company. Aiden was _good_ , and she begged, _begged_ the universe to give her this, to give her a friend she could have by her side. To let her love and be loved, but all she had was his voice, filtered through unreliable radio feedback that sounded like the cackles of fire.

Far more than what she deserves, honestly.)

She couldn’t tell him about the nightmare that she had, couldn’t explain the uncomfortable prickling sense at the back of her head, as if somebody was watching her. How could she even begin to explain? It was so abstract and nonsensical, there was barely even a story to tell; not one that was obvious.

All she could think to explain the experience was how cold she felt in it, in all respects. A harsh breeze rushing through reopened wounds, her head exposed to pins and needles that picked and prodded carelessly at every muscle and nerve. She felt like a zombie, or an inhumane being, an entity acting on primitive, villainous instincts. Some sort of gangly monster that made no sense.

She hopes that he understood.

“Okay,” Aiden finally relented, “But if you ever need to talk, I’m here, okay?”

Cassie inhaled, shuddering, unsure and terrified.

“Okay.”

* * *

**1**

The lines a writer would say in a story describing a terrifying situation, of how it’s a nightmare one couldn’t wake up from, are overused. Cassie knew this both from experience and from how much material she’d been able to read over the years. Yet despite the ubiquity of the description, it wasn’t wrong.

A situation one didn’t want to be in, one that they were completely unfamiliar with; a scenario in which they didn’t know what to do, why it was happening; in which it was so real, and they felt so helpless-

A delusion, their brain manipulating them into believing an idea, whether it was true or not.

It is a nightmare. It’s something one would have to experience and remember to truly understand.

It was inhuman.

Cassie chuckled to herself lifelessly. “Inhuman” is the perfect description for this nightmare that she lived in. This poisoned world, the people around her twisted into physical embodiments of fear, were far from the definition of humane.

(What was worse about it was that it was none of their faults.)

“I’m sorry,” Aiden said to break through the deafening, weighted fog. Cassie couldn’t resist the urge to curl up, couldn’t resist the childish need to cry no matter how hard she tried.

“Why are you apologizing?” She asks. For a moment, she felt like she was back at the other world, with Dan and Stampy sharing cookies and filming. “It’s not your fault,” she said as she switched the SD cards, as she fiddled with her tearing sleeves.

Aiden laughed, but it was short and bittersweet. If she were next to him right now, she might have looked at him and admired that humanity; for now, all she could do was cherish the warmth.

An ember from the flames popped out of the sword and fell gracefully to the ground.

“Think of it as my condolence, then,” he said. “I’m sorry you went through this bullshit.”

There was barely a moment after the words before Cassie choked on a sob, and buried her tear-streaked face into the old, dusty blanket. With a weak and trembling voice, “Save your empathy for somebody worth saving.”

(She’s a murderer and she knows this. Cassie Rose isn’t and was never any better than the people who tortured her- she has no excuse for the killings she committed, and she never will make any excuses for herself. She shouldn’t be granted any sort of empathy or affection or civil treatment.

Aiden deserved better than that.)

Normally, when one woke up from the fake reality that scared them, they woke up in relief. Relief that the thing that scared them wasn’t as horrific or terrifying in real life as it was in the dream. Today wasn’t the case. Today, Cassie Rose woke up from a nightmare, one induced by a boss monster she couldn’t even begin to defeat, only to return to a nightmare in real life.

“What am I even supposed to make of all of that?” She murmurs noiselessly. She feels so lost.

“I don’t know, Cass.”

Aiden seems to feel the same.

She sighed, “It’s okay,” as she buried her head in her knees, crumpling the food wrapped in her blood-caked hands. Perhaps she was being lazy with the excuse that she was trying to take a breath, but she’d been sitting here at the dim campfire for over 24 hours.

(In the first eight she woke up to, she did absolutely nothing, only breathing in and out as best as she could without taking in the dust and dirt around her. In the next hour, she scarfed down most of her food supply and was left to two raw chops of pork before the 23rd minute. It took two hours before she could even begin to talk to Aiden again, and another hour for her to tell him about her nightmare.

The remaining twelve hours consisted of her teary, rapidly blinking eyes staring at the flickering, dying fire.

By midnight, she leaned over to the cracked sword and let her fingers gently brush the old, molten weapon. As it always did, a large fire emerged with a roar from the tip of the sword, burrowing through the soil.

As overwhelming as the sensation was, Cassie felt relief at the feeling of control she managed to take back.

It was just a matter of whether that was real or just another delusion.)

For a long time, silence and the slight crinkle of audio feedback as Aiden moved around his cramped, little office were all she had against her formless thoughts.

Relief and dread took her over instantaneously as Aiden cut through once again. “Hey, Cass?” He started with a soft, low voice. She acknowledged him with a mere hum. “Did you ever check the other chests around you?”

“...No?” Cassie frowned. She hadn’t. “No, I haven’t.”

“Could you check? There might be something there.”

“Sure?”

Cassie didn’t expect anything beyond dusty blankets and broken weaponry, and she did find those and more on the first chest, and it seemed like the second one she opened would have been the same, but as she took the wrapped food to keep in her inventory, she stopped. Her hand hovered over the GUI, eyes darting between the two new items in her inventory and the chest.

“There are more.”

Rods, just like the silver one she found and later broke to make the bucket. The rod she found in the chest was similarly dull and cold; the other, which she found in her inventory, was a brilliant red, glowing with a soft hum. She stared at both in surprise and awe, fixated on the opposing items as she sat back down against a log. The red rod was warm in her hand, a stark contrast to the harsh, dead cold that was the other rod. Holding it up to the bonfire’s light, she could see that it was something like blue or cyan, though that was ruined now by how dead and dull it was. Cold and nothing.

“You’ve found more rods, haven’t you,” Aiden said more than asked.

“Two. One red and one blue- cyan.”

Aiden sighed deeply, putting his head in his hands. He cursed under his breath after awhile, following a sigh.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I thought it was just a baseless theory earlier,” he said lowly as he fell back into his chair. “But with what you found it might actually be true.”

Cassie’s frown deepened. “What might?”

The boy at the other side whined, running a hand through his hair, lips pursed as he tried to come up with a way to explain.

“Cassie, have you heard of the Order of the Stone?”

“Your friends?”

Aiden laughed lightly, “No, not really my ‘friends,’ but…”

Those people that stopped her murder spree. The people that had the flint and steel, and revealed to the rest that Stampy had the green one from their world. Jesse, the super-resilient and stubborn boy, that old man Ivor-

The blond writer Lukas and the armored girl Petra. She inhaled sharply as she realized, “They were the two monsters I fought earlier.”

“And the third,” Aiden added. “There are two more in the New Order, Olivia and Axel. Olivia was the boss monster in your nightmare.”

The twin-tailed girl in red.

“They were Jesse’s original friends, before Petra and Lukas and Ivor. If his profile here is accurate, Ivor is already dead,” he explained matter-of-factly. He adjusted the folder in his hands, looking over the old ink. “He has been for a long time now, actually. All the adults are. Everybody from before our generation is _dead_.”

With a frown, he put the folder down, “But that just means we can take him out of consideration.”

Cassie took out the bucket she made with the silver rod, cold and dry; and looked at it from every angle in one hand while the two others - dead and alive - were bunched up in the other. “The Order of the Stone had this amulet that served as a tracking device for each one of them, and there were four rods in a sort of cross representing each member, with a lapis-colored gem in the middle. That one in the middle represents Jesse.”

With that in mind, she was suddenly invigorated, focused and interested as she laid out the rods before her. The silver, the cyan - both cold and dead - and the red rod, the only one still faintly glowing with a low hum.

The only one still alive.

“So Lukas the enderman, Petra the spider, Olivia the nightmare…” Her eyes drifted to the empty spots of dirt after the red rod. She imagined two more taking their places: a green rod, and a lapis-blue gem.

“Three boss monsters encountered,” Cassie held up three fingers and counted each, “Three rods, three Order members… But, wait.” She opened her inventory again and took out the glowing orb that Lunacy had dropped so long ago, when Cassie met her for the first time and killed her. “What about this one?”

“Lunacy? Stella?”

“Yeah, she didn’t have a rod. You never mentioned her, so did she have any significance at all?”

Aiden shuffled around the office, picking up papers and opening folders.

“There’s nothing interesting on her besides Champion City. I don’t think she ever became part of the Order, or was ever important to begin with.”

The orb in her hands hummed, displeased. Cassie’s lips twitched upwards.

“So, what? She just managed to survive and take over that whole city?”

“I guess,” Aiden said with a disinterested shrug. “Those explosions and stuff you heard the first time were just her fighting and killing the other monsters here.”

“The ones transformed by this Virus then, right? Not just regular mobs?”

“Yeah. So she’s not really important, she’s just one of the monsters that managed to survive this massive worldwide PvP, which I’m guessing is something _everybody_ indulged in, since you haven’t encountered other monsters like her or the Order either.”

“So everybody’s dead?”

“I guess so.”

Cassie nodded, closing that line of questioning for now as she kept Lunacy’s drop back in her inventory.

“So you have two left.” Aiden continued. “Two more bosses, Axel and Jesse.”

She affirmed that with a nod, “I have two left. But…”

“Two left until _what_?”

That made her pause.

“What are you trying to do, Cassie?” He asked out of genuine curiosity.

Cassie frowned.

“What are you talking about?” She shrugged, although despite herself, she bit her lip nervously; in just as much confusion and helpless cluelessness as Aiden as the unknown crept back up on her. “I’m- I’m here to find out _why_ I’m here. I wanna know what’s going on.”

She had no idea when she picked the bucket back up in her hands, but it was here now, and she fiddled with the handle, anxious. “I’m here for a reason, and you clearly don’t have all the answers in your office, so- I thought, y’know, that I’d find something if or when I found Jesse.”

“But why?” Goes the unanswered question.

Why? Why? Why?

It’s beyond the girl. She has no answer.

Escaping the uncomfortable unknown, she packs up and leaves the campsite.

* * *

“We’re looking for Beacontown!” Cassie exclaimed in dissonant determination.

“We’re looking for Beacontown.” Aiden reaffirmed.

Time would pass, slowly, quickly, until it dissipated into nothing. Some abstract thought that was incomprehensible to Cassie as she passed through the different biomes and seas and oceans and long-gone civilizations. Everything seemed to just exist as she strode past, like it was a foggy backdrop that meant nothing; like it was just filler to get to the main point.

Midway through, she came upon a branching road. The left hand side was dark and crowded with broken and old garbage. Rubble, branches, toys yet to be repaired. The path in front of her, blocked only by a single fence gate with no adjoining posts, was as clear as a valley, a dirt road out of the way of disrepair and showing a clear path to floating whales and burgers and balloons. Seeing this sudden stop to her path prompted her to swear under her breath as she examined her options. “So much for a straight path,” she mumbled. Aiden winced.

“I go straight, right?” She looked between the two roads, “ _Can_ I go straight?”

“They both lead to Beacontown, I don’t think it matters,” Aiden stammered as he fumbled with maps and compasses. “But, uh- I think the one straight ahead is a little shorter?”

“And obstacle free, by the looks of it,” Cassie added as she squinted at her destination, extremely easy to see under the moonlight.

Her companion shrugged. “If you wanna go through there, I don’t think there’s any harm.”

She thought over it for a very brief moment, that moment ending when she looked at the dark path once more and remembered the crowded forests she’d navigated through for so long.

A valley would actually be a breath of fresh air.

“Straight path it is!”

Fitting for a desolate, apocalyptic world. She abandoned the twisting, confusing, winding forest behind, happy to have some straightforwardness for once. For awhile, she trekked languidly through the dirt road. It was exactly as she thought, refreshing (as refreshing as being covered in dried muck and blood would be, at least), and a nice, peaceful break from everything she’d endured so far.

But like everything, it was short lived.

The groan behind her was the only warning she had before she was shoved forward, after a golden blade sliced open a wound on her arm. She cried out as she fell, and could barely draw her sword in time to dodge the next attack. The zombie pigman made garbled noises as it swung its golden sword carelessly, and the girl paled.

“What the hell?!” Cassie gasped for breath, “This doesn’t make sense, I haven’t even encountered a pigman before today!”

“Well, it’s attacking you now, you may as well kill it!”

So she did. She hacked and slashed at the pigman until it was too mangled to hold itself up, and it fell over and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Staring at what it left behind, the rotten flesh and the golden nugget, her face was scrunched in confusion, brows furrowed as she tried to make sense of it. “What the hell.”

Should I be afraid?

“You should get moving,” Aiden said. “Beacontown should be a safe spot for now.”

The girl’s eyes dart all over the landscape she found herself in. Long stretches of grasslands, the roadless path she took to get here. The forest was so far away, it was a mere bundle of specks from what she could see. Virtually, she was alone.

High above her was the moon, shining in its frozen glory.

Cassie gulped. “I should get going.”

In a hurry, she got up and sprinted for Beacontown, leaving the pigman remnants behind to despawn.

Getting there took forever and no time at all.

* * *

**2**

Cassie didn’t know what to expect to find at Beacontown, but if she had any expectations, she wasn’t sure whether what she found lived up to it or not.

She knew that there were gates, but they seemed to have been completely blown open. Pieces of what used to be the terracotta gate hung dangerously from their hinges, resting only on the huge pile of debris and old furniture. It was covered in dust and dirt and ash, boarding up the entrance to town.

Was there even anything beyond there?

“There has to be,” Cassie mutters, “Who would go this far to board up an abandoned town?”

“You think there’s something valuable inside?”

“Is there anything in your files?”

“No, it’s- I can’t read it, the text is all smudged.” He set aside the paper and moved closer to the desktop, “I’ll try to find a digital copy.”

“Okay.”

While he scoured through his files, Cassie put a hand to the barricade, feeling the old and rot of the amalgamated material. It chipped away under the pressure of her fingers, some of the wood and paint sticking to her when she pulled away. They blended perfectly with the dried blood.

“I think I can get in,” she mumbled softly.

(“Be careful.”

A smile flickered on her lips.

“I will.”)

With careful hand, she reached for the same part again and held it with a firmer grip. It felt sticky and gross, but in her bloody palm it felt right. She dug her fingers into it and tugged.

The wood creaked.

She took another piece, the arm of a chair, and with both hands she pulled the two separate pieces to her. The sudden movement caused her to stagger backwards from the force, together with the pieces of the barricade that quickly fell to the ground with the thunderous noise of a **_CRASH!_**.

It collapsed easily, and when the dust settled and Cassie could breathe normally, she could see the main road of Beacontown. As clear as day, but as wrecked and bloody of a mess as the world around it, covered in shadow.

What she assumed were once tall apartments or floating builds were now broken pieces, falling apart and standing only in the rubble of their own remains. It was littered in overgrowth. Bloody leaves and flowers have wrapped themselves over everything they could touch, from bones and pillars to the cracks of the concrete ground. Yet even with that, everything seemed so dead.

She’s sure the place used to be lovely, maybe bright and colorful and alive; but this alone was evidence enough that the world she was in was an undead echo of what it used to be. She could see guts scattered about the road, some sticking to the walls. There weren’t even flickering lights, not a sign of persisting life.

It was… empty.

Dead.

“ _Shit._ ”

“Whatever happened here, whatever virus ruined this place, it fucked everything over good,” Aiden said in horror.

Cassie couldn’t agree more.

Stepping over the broken barricade at her feet and in through the torn gates, she could see more. Beacontown was covered in ash and smelled rotten, like the town itself was a corpse by its own right. The smells intermingled and made her scrunch her nose in disgust. The air was thick, and it was humid. The roads were entirely covered in black powder, ashy from corpses and bones that have long withered away.

When Aiden said that everyone was dead, he _meant it_. Nothing seemed alive anymore. She felt as if an intruder in this graveyard, the only person living and breathing, stepping foot all over bones, through still, suffocating air. Like a shameless grave robber looking to steal from the dead, their remnants of memories, just to get by.

The realization fully hit her when she arrived at a memorial, withering away and crumbling to pieces, just like everything else in the dead town. It was largely unremarkable, looking at it without context. If not for the woven portrait of a pig, now ripped to shreds and leaving her with the most unnerving, unnatural stare; she would have left it alone.

If anything, staring back at the pig, she wished she never met it at all.

(An indignant snort.)

She turned in a panic. A self-conscious shiver ran down her spine, as if something was running its cold claws over her, the wind becoming something it wasn’t. The town became a monochromatic blur as she tried to find the scare before it got her first. Her eyes ran over her environment once, twice, thrice; trying to look into the gaps she missed for the monster, but found nothing.

Cassie gulped. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

“I mean, when you think about it, none of this is right,” Aiden said dully, “Whatever this Virus is, it made everything _un_ right.”

“Incorrect,” she said, more to silence her nerves than to actually correct him, “The word for ‘unright’ is incorrect.”

A skeptical hum. “I dunno, I think there’s a better word for it.”

“Wrong, then?”

Her companion shrugged indifferently.

The worst part of her fear was that there were no sounds. Beacontown was dead silent. Not even a whistle of the wind would come to comfort her.

“What could be here?” Cassie wondered aloud, “Is there anything even in here? Why board this place up if nobody’s inside?”

“Maybe Beacontown was barricaded because of the virus? Maybe Jesse put the place on quarantine,” Aiden suggested.

She shook her head, “No way. That barricade was made up of old, dusty furniture. You don’t protect a town with old, breaking, vulnerable furniture. Iron or obsidian, maybe, but not that.” She twisted to look at the entrance behind her, now gaping wide open, with the clutter framing the bottom. “That looked like it was made in haste. And…”

The smell of death was hard to ignore.

“A mere sickness wouldn’t cause this much of a bloodbath.”

Aiden hummed, thinking it over. “I mean, I guess if it would make something like a gigantic tarantula-human hybrid monster, it wouldn’t be a very normal disease.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

Turning back to the memorial, to the pig whose eyes seemed to bore into hers, she turned away, a shiver coursing through her. Without another thought, she walked ahead instead, brisking past the dirty water of an octopus statue and the bubbling lava of the tentacled pad, trying to ignore the feeling of being watched.

Eventually, she was faced with the unlit beacon, the namesake of the town. 

She had to resist the urge to puke upon catching sight of the bones and blood, the gore that intermingled with and polluted the pool of water beneath it. Crumbs of said dead muck fell into the still waters from the mound of corpses, piled on top of the stained glass and broken beacons.

On top of that small hill was a sword, bleeding orange light.

Cassie gasped softly.

She looked down again, toward the foundation of the sword. The bodies. The dirt. The blood. The old glass. She could barely differentiate arm from leg as she stared at the pile. The water was still. Beacontown was silent.

Her realization came out in a fearful mumble, “This is the fourth boss.” Looking around gave her no indication of what would happen, of where Axel would come from, and that only made her more afraid.

(What if she couldn’t beat him, like she couldn’t beat Olivia?)

“If you need to run, the gates are wide open right there,” Aiden supplied.

“That’s true, but,” she turned back to the large statue of the rotting, purple octopus, “I could get caught in that pool.”

Not many good options.

She looked down at her weapons. Different material variants of swords and axes, and even shovels and picks and hoes, littered her inventory; all with mid to low durability. She bit her lip.

Cassie had no idea what Axel was going to turn out like. _Aiden_ had no idea what to expect, considering he couldn’t find anything at all, digital or physical.

“I’m sure there are anvils in the Order’s Temple. If you can’t get out, you can hole yourself up inside long enough to repair some of your weapons.”

“That’s assuming I have anything on me to even fix them in the first place.”

“There must be ingots in the temple _somewhere_.”

Cassie sighed.

“Look, we don’t have many options-”

“ _Unless_ I go inside now and then tap the sword with fully repaired weapons!”

Aiden frowned. “What if you die inside? Then you’ll get spawned all the way back at the camp where Petra’s body is, and you’ve traveled so far.”

A beat passed. Cassie sighed, “...You’re right.”

“If you want, I can get files on the layout of the Order’s Temple and find out where the anvils and stuff are,” he suggested, “I can direct you when you need to find it.”

“Can you pull them up right now?”

“I can start.”

Cassie looked back up at the mound, at the sword set on top.

“Okay.”

With a few deep breaths, she began to climb the mound, being careful not to slip. Guts and bloated bodies squelched under her weight as she climbed higher and higher. She ended up kneeling in front of the sword, sitting in its pyre of bones and old soil. Its light, orange glow , bleeding through vein-like cracks, seemed bright and blinding against the dark, star-less sky.

Tentatively, she reached out — “Be careful, Cassie.” — and let her fingers brush against the old prop.

The sword exploded, sending out shockwaves of rushing, revived air and towering flames. Cassie let out a yelp as she was pushed away, tumbling to the ground. Her ears were ringing, and her back hurt; even more so when she only stopped rolling when she hit a pole that quickly crumbled upon impact. The imprint of it on her back thrummed with a stinging ache. She groaned, trying to wade through all that and the images that flashed in her mind. They overlapped on top of each other, becoming an indecipherable nothing of blinding white.

“C s ie ?”

Garbled noises directly in her ear. Her head hurt.

“ as i ! Y u ave to r n!”

Everything hurt. Her head pounded. The ground beneath her trembled. A cacophony of loud groans sounded from faraway, monotonous and boring and _terrifying._

There were the cackles too.

The laughter.

The Futility.

“Cassie!”

Her eyes flew open to the sight of burning, humanoid figures shambling towards her, groaning and growling through guts and blood. She screamed.

“Cassie, run!”

She did.

* * *

Cassie scrambled to get up, briefly entertaining the idea of leaving Beacontown, but at the swing of a golden sword, she backed away into the nearest alley instead. She unsheathed her own sword quickly, breaking diamonds gleaming dully in the dark, weak against the bright flames coming from the humanoid on fire. With a dead end to her right and a line of shops to her left, she prepared to run, watching the clumsy corpses make their way towards her. She swung at it when it got close, hitting it just enough to force it back. A low grunt, a snort, escaped it as it raised its sword.

Her eyes widened in shock when she realized what it was.

Her fears were only confirmed when she heard more groans, coming louder from beyond the walls. Another figure, burning up in seemingly undying flames just like its comrade, came through the entrance to the alley; and several thumps and thuds sounded from the other side.

They snorted. Though they were limping, they were walking faster.

The zombie pigman swung its sword.

With a yell, Cassie blocked the attack, then pushed, knocking the pigman to the ground and reducing it to ash. The flames got caught by the wood and cloth of the nearby shop.

Cassie paled. The pigman coming for her, now framed by the flames that quickly spread, raised its sword.

She turned and ran.

Like a miracle sent by god, Aiden’s voice returned to her as clear as day. “There’s an opening at the end of this alley,” he said, “You’ll find Ivor’s house at the end of this path. Watch out for the lava. When you get there, past the tentacles, you should be able to see the west wing of the temple. You can get in through there.”

As Cassie ran past, a shop was broken into pieces, and the sound of the pigmen’s growls came loud and clear. The one behind her wasn’t too far behind.

“Okay.”

She pushed forward.

Making it to the tentacled pod, she weaved through to the plot of land at the other side, as quick as she could, ignoring the growls and sounds of the pigmen wading through the lava to catch her. “There!” She gasped upon sighting the West Wing. The pigmen were fast approaching, making it out of the pool of lava just as she ran past. But adrenaline fueled her, and within a minute she was at the dock of the wing, faced only with the paned window looking into a stairwell.

Without hesitation, she took out her pickaxe and swung as hard as she could, and broke the window in seconds. With equally hard punches and kicks, there was a hole large enough for her to get through, and she did. Burning pigmen nearly grabbed at her as she slid through, and their arms – charred, rotting, and alight with flames – groped through the broken pane. Quickly, she took out blocks and placed them in front of the window. Their noises became muffled, though they were loud enough to still be uncomfortable to the ears.

“That barricade won’t last very long. Pigmen are resilient, and these ones I’m guessing more so. You have to get moving.”

  
“Yeah,” Cassie looked around in a hurry, “I know.”

The halls were, surprisingly, not all that dark. The ceiling lamps flickered incessantly, but Cassie could see clearly all the way to the end of the East Wing…

Where she could see the shadow of a lone figure, standing silently at the end of the hall. The noises of the pigmen became muffled and almost nonexistent to her as she was rendered frozen in horror, staring at the burly man in ragged, dirty clothing.

The lights flickered, as did his shadow, but the glint of his glass eyes, of the gas mask, was unmistakable. 

Axel glared at her, a fire in his eyes. The lights flickered again, and he seemed to step closer.

With a terrified yelp, she ran.

* * *

**3**

Death was humid. It plagued the temple and stuck itself to the walls, poisoned the air and what remnants were left of any life.

She felt hot as she ran up the stairs. Her muscles burned and her heart raced, and it hurt, but she pushed through. Sweating bullets and heaving for breath every second, she ran away. Far, far away from the monster. She hadn’t looked back, in fear of seeing him right behind her. She relied on denial. She relied on placebo.

Yet at the same time, everything felt cold.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she pulled out all the blocks she had and covered it up, not bothering to take the time to think about how much she had left, or how many more she had to use. She had no time to. It contradicted with how much time she wanted to have, to get out, to live.

The time, she used to breathe, spending those few seconds panting, gasping. She looked around and saw only darkness, dust, and faint streams of moonlight seeping in through cracks and broken windows. Just as everything was, it felt so empty. It felt so cold.

(Humid.)

She couldn’t waste any time. Precious time.

“Aiden, I need those anvils!”

“Just up ahead! There’s an open room with no walls, it’s right next to Petra’s old room. There’s an anvil and a grindstone there.”

No matter how much she might regret the decision later, she thanked herself for covering the entrance to the second floor in layers of mismatched materials. It was a weak barricade to slow the pigmen down, but given how fast pigmen could run despite themselves, she needed as much time as she could get, had to do no matter what to slow them down.

She found the armory quick enough, a small, unwalled room between two others. Making haste, she took heaps of materials from a nearby chest and repaired as many swords and axes as she could.

As soon as she’d finished filling her hotbar with weapons, and holding a newfound shied in her offhand, the signature sound of pigmen pounding on the walls sounded. Cassie’s heartbeat quickened, then she felt lightheaded, and despaired when the lights began to flicker. She exited the armory, looking at both ends of the hall to find Axel. A part of her didn’t want to find him. A part of her did.

But she was greeted to empty, dusty halls.

“ _Oh god,_ ” Cassie shivered. Her trembling fingers struggled to keep hold of her axe. “Shit, where is he?”

(What do I do?)

“You need to deal with those pigmen, Cass. They’ll keep coming. They’ll corner you if you keep running.”

She paled. “You know how pigmen are! Maybe if I just exhaust them, they’ll calm down.”

“You got attacked by a pigman on the way here, Cassie, unprovoked! These pigmen aren’t _normal_ pigmen. They’re Axel’s. _Futility’s_.”

Why should that make sense? How could he know that for sure?

You can’t hide.

Cassie grumbled, inhaling sharply through grit teeth. “Fine!”

The barricade fell apart, and the pigmen broke through. It was terrifying how quickly they made it to her position, outright sprinting as a mob and moving like a cloud of smoke. She quickly switched her axe for a sword, seeing the mob, and slashed as soon as they reached arm’s length. They were pushed back, some disappeared into piles of ash, which the others walked over without thought to attack their target. She blocked and ducked and slashed and ran, leading the mutated swine around the second floor as if she had a carrot on a stick.

It was mindless.

The violence and tricks became a blur to her as she ran and attacked when she could, throwing sharpened hoes at the crowd as she weaved through the winding halls of the second floor. A sense of nausea overwhelmed her as it continued. Perhaps from the smell of decomposition, perhaps from the flickering lights. She stumbled constantly, tumbling into walls, relying on her shield to withstand the horde long enough to get out of a corner; to the point that it broke and shattered into pieces, shards and splinters flying all over the floor around her. In desperation, she swung her sword and ran, scarfed down the rest of her food in an attempt to survive.

Her chest felt heavy,

and she felt like burning.

* * *

When all the pigmen were gone, her knees instantly buckled beneath her, and she collapsed to the floor. Pig guts and blood and bone surrounded her, arranged like mosaic.

(The moonlight shining through — beams bouncing from the metal of her sword, to the anvil, to every reflective surface in the second floor’s one corridor; shining on her like a spotlight — made her feel like the scene was almost as pretty as stained glass.)

She felt so tired.

“That was just the first wave. More are going to come soon.”

So tired. She could lull herself to sleep with the silence of the night alone. The almost hypnotic sound droning through her head didn’t help her at all.

Was it white noise? A music box?

She didn’t want to move. Her legs were sore. Her fingers were bleeding.

“There are potions downstairs, if you need them. They could help slow down the pigmen. I’m sure Ivor kept a bunch of arrows and crossbows in his basement.”

It was so soft.

Cassie wondered if she ever had a comfort blanket when she was younger.

(She didn’t.)

Was that what this felt like? Security? Relief? Comfort?

(Denial?)

“Cassie.”

She recognized his voice. That’s Aiden’s voice. It was soft and friendly. The feedback made it hurt her ear, the crinkling to loud to bear, but she could still make him out through the fog. He was there. He’s always been there. Here.

“You’re low on hearts.”

Dully, she looked down. She saw trembling hearts. She saw darkness.

The sight ignited an itch inside of her. She twitched.

(“Distractions help with the pain.”)

She sighed deeply and closed her eyes. Just a few more moments. She needed a few more moments.

* * *

“Okay.”

Slowly, she stood on wobbly legs and ambled her way to the basement lab, taking the long stretch of the corridor down to the East Wing staircase.

She was quiet, for the most part. Her dragging feet were quiet in the wide expanse of the moonlit night. Birds and insects wailed. Monsters died. A dragon cried.

It wasn’t anything remarkable.

The droning in her head continued. It seemed to become louder and more obnoxious as she moved forward. The noise was disjointed, but the more it went on, the more it became clear to her that there was a melody, a tune in the incomprehensible. A line, one that moved in a pattern. She couldn’t quite understand nor recognize it, but she could hear it. It was there.

It was… right..

there. To her left.

She turned her head slowly, to the slightly ajar, dark oak door. The yellow knob was rusted over, and the wood at the edges was cracked. Dried blood seemed to cake the ridged edges. The gap offered a good view of the inside, enough for her to see only a tall, large shadow stand at the edge of the moonlight.

It seemed to be another bedroom. There was a bed, and there were chests of belongings, but they didn’t seem to be filled too much. Clothes, memorabilia, unfilled notebooks; there was sand and powders of various kinds. There were papers. Photos.

There was the shadow, who stood in front of a music box and a gas mask.

His face was disfigured, burned and charred and rotting. Cassie could see now, in this quiet. She could see the exposed brain. She could see the open, ever bleeding wounds. She could see his bones, and his muscles; his capillaries and arteries and veins. His worn and torn clothing, the burns and the scratches. Smears of gunpowder and blood and ash and pus.

He was so. . . Alone.

(The music box wasn’t much comfort.

The feedback was too much.)

“Can I take him out now?” Cassie wondered.

“No,” said Aiden, heard only by her. “Don’t. You’re too weak. You need food.”

She itched. Her fingers twitched. The sight of her axe on her hotbar was too tempting, too noisy.

“ _Cassie._ ”

(I could just-)

“If you die here, you’ll just respawn at the bonfire outside. You’ll have to get through that wave all over again.”

She bit her lip, peeled and bleeding.

“You can come back. He’ll be there, waiting.”

All this time, Axel stood noiselessly. The music box was all that made a sound.

(It seemed mournful.)

She let her hand drop to her side. “Okay.”

Quickly, she took to the staircase and made her way to the basement.

(At the sound of footsteps, Axel whipped around, but found nothing. A ghost seemed to pass by his door, but it was too fast to tell.

Still, he knew something was here. _She_ was here.

Saying nothing, he resumed his lament. He turned back to the music box and watched. As the moonlight glinted in the goggles of the gas mask, the artificial notes drowned him further in floods of faint, vague memories.)

* * *

The basement seemed to be larger than the second or first floors.

Cassie found herself glad that she took a pit stop at the kitchen first before making her way down here. As if it wasn’t enough that the New Order’s temple had two basements, the lab that Ivor used to work in was massive, looking as if it would take her days to navigate the place and get out the way she came. It was made up of pillars upon pillars, between rooms upon rooms; all white and speckled grey diorite, clearly polished, but aged and abandoned.

Hypothetically, she could starve down here. She had to scarf down three steaks to feel well enough for another fight. A quarter of her inventory was filled with food stolen from the Order’s kitchen. Would that be enough for her to stay alive, if she ever got lost in this maze?

“As long as you stick to one path, you’ll be fine.”

(Aiden. A comfort.)

Or maybe she was seeing things. Maybe she was still dazed. Maybe this wasn’t much of a maze.

“Arrows and potions,” Cassie reminded herself, “And some sort of bow. That’s all I’m here for.”

“The farthest room, at the back, to the right, is where Ivor kept everything. He always worked there.”

Vague instructions, but she could make out the image in her head. Straight down the corridor, first room to her right.

“Got it.”

She walked.

Her steps echoed in the vast abyss. Soft _tap, tap, taps_ that slowly faded away the farther they went. Crumbs of dried blood and dirt trailed behind her.

The maze was perfectly lit, almost blinding to an unbearable degree. It fit the title of a “laboratory,” what with how white and bright it was.

(Though there were no posters. No distractions.)

Just the voices. The faraway groans of the new wave of pigmen.

“They’re waking up.”

“I know. I have time.”

Ivor’s laboratory was so much more different from the rest of the basement. Besides being next to a dark, dark staircase going down to the bunker, it seemed much more comfortable than everything else. It was much less “laboratory” and much more like “home.” A green bed was tucked at a corner, beneath paintings and notes and drawings stuck to the wall. Tables and chairs were made of oak and spruce, tiles of polished andesite made up the floor; there were chests, there were flowers, wilting and dying. Lanterns lit up the places in sporadic locations, and the brewing stands bubbled with long-finished potions. The blaze rods glowed. And a jukebox in the corner sat patient, obedient, waiting to be instructed with another song.

She pressed the ‘play’ button lightly. C418’s _chirp_ filled the air, with a nostalgic, crinkly sound; old, but well-loved.

It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it would do. She could try to ignore the familiar, dissonant absence of life by herself.

(She was used to that.)

The chests were hard to open, aged and creaky, but she managed to heave the lids off of the boxes. They broke into pieces as she threw them to the floor, but they weren’t needed. She was too busy staring in awe at the glowing potions inside.

“Yes!”

She took everything that might help her. Splash potions of slowness and harming filled her inventory, and soon enough she was equipped with enough ammo for her to last another wave.

They weren’t arrows, but potions would do just as nicely.

“I should save,” she said to herself. “Get back to the bonfire.”

“You better hurry up then. And be careful. The pigmen are starting to respawn all over the temple.”

She took out her sword in her offhand, a potion in the other. Seeing the ethereal glow in her hand and hotbar satisfied her, a grin making its way to her face. Elation warmed her chest and adrenaline coursed through her.

“I will.”

* * *

She left the laboratory, sword and potions ready, and found, to her surprise, that there were no pigmen to greet her at the foot of the stairwell.

“They should have heard me, right? I played that jukebox.”

“They could be upstairs,” Aiden said, just as cautious as she was. “But wherever they are, I’d take this opportunity to run upstairs and get to the fire as fast as possible.”

She couldn’t agree more.

She sprinted for the stairwell, up the steps and through the corridor. The lights were flickering, and she could feel her heartbeat quickening, her head throbbing. It was happening again, the new wave. They were _somewhere_ , she’s sure of it.

She _was_ sure of it,

but she ran outside, impatient and anxious to mark her progress.

It would have been relieving, feeling the cold air rush to her and (temporarily) leaving behind the putrid humidity of the temple inside as she opened the doors wide, and it was. Except for one thing: the bonfire was gone.

Cassie had stared, mouth hanging open, gaping wide in frozen horror. “It was always there before, right?” She asked, trying to not believe herself mad or confused. “The sword was on top of the beacon.”

The unlit beacon, which sat in front of the main entrance, which resembled the Order’s amulet. She ran up to it, finding the broken, stained glass; the dirt; the polluted water; but the mound was gone, and so were the sword and the bones. There was nothing else. It was just a structure, left dead in the moonlight.

Cassie shook her head. “No, _no!_ ”

“So we can’t save?”

“No!” She whipped around, looking for the save point, looking for _something_ , “No!”

But she found nothing.

She stared back at the beacon, mound-less and sword-less. She stared with fear and panic, and confusion, and horror swirling inside her. Her head hurt. A chill ran through her, but she couldn’t tell why, be it the cold or being watched. Perhaps it was the pig tapestry. Perhaps it was the moonlight. Perhaps it was Axel watching from a window she couldn’t see.

“Does this mean I have to fight him and just luck out? What if I die, where would I even respawn?”

Aiden shook his head, equally clueless. “I don’t know, Cass. I guess we have to find out.”

Cassie looked up at the window that didn’t exist, and saw the monster sulking in his room, staring at the pathetic, broken music box. Staring at pictures.

“I think I can take him easily,” she said to herself. It was a futile attempt at reassurance. “He’s just… standing there.”

“We don’t know how powerful he is, Cassie,” Aiden reminded her. “ _Please_ be careful.”

(I’ll try to.)

Cassie looks down at her hands and switches the sword for her axe. She feels it, weighty in her hands, still strong enough to withstand a wave of pigmen, scratched and chipped and covered in stains of gore.

It was slow, but powerful. Patient. Stealthy.

Her eyes drifted towards the the gaping doors of the New Order’s temple. Her grip on her axe is firm and tight.

(Potion in the off-hand. Axe in the main.)

In a hurry, she brisk walks back inside.

* * *

**4**

There are no pigmen in sight. She can hear the groans and the snorts, but it’s impossible to tell where they’re from, how far away or how close they are. She presses forward, ignoring them in favor of progress. She heads for the East Wing, this time. Closer to Axel’s room. Faster. Her axe in one hand and a potion of harming in the other.

Slowly, she creeps up the steps, willing herself to be silent and invisible in the quiet dark.

She found Axel again, in the same room, in the same position. He musn’t have moved since earlier.

What was he doing there? Sulking? Reminiscing? Over what?

“It doesn’t matter. Just get in, get out. Before he notices.”

Right.

He’s still standing there, his back to her and the droning music box still filling the toxic air. She positions herself, aiming the axe at the monster in the room.

...And throws.

The axe flies through the gap and straight for the monster’s back, a flash of diamonds gleaming in the moonlight. It’s magnificent and blinding, and it catches Cassie off-guard when she sees it, blade-first, flying _towards_ her. She barely has enough time to dodge before it grazes her shoulder, embedding itself into the wall behind her. She falls to the ground with a yell, and when she looks up, she sees the walking corpse stand over her, glassy, abyss-like eyes all that she can see in the dark. His blood drips down on her, joining the rest of the stains on her hands and jacket.

Within seconds, he has her by the neck, and she’s violently thrown back onto the ground, headfirst. Everything becomes a haze as her ears ring and nausea consumes her. She feels to vomit as the bleeding bones of Axel’s fingers dig themselves into her neck. The floor beneath her is gone as he picks her up again, and up in the air, she can vaguely see his glare from behind the gas mask, fiery and upset, and in an instant it’s gone from sight, as she feels her head throb even more.

It aches. Everything aches and hurts, and she wants it to stop. She barely has any coordination left. She knows she’s holding Axel’s arm, trying to get him to let go, but she knows that won’t work.

“Your sword,” she can hear Aiden tell her, “Get your sword!”

Sword. Hotbar.

It’s somewhere there. Her hand falls limp as she tries to find it. She fails to, as she finds a glass bottle in her hands instead, but that’s enough for her. With no hesitation, she swings it at Axel’s exposed head, and hears a loud, booming scream right after. She feels light, then the hard surface of the floor. Her head hurts and her ears are still ringing and she knows she’s bleeding, but that doesn’t matter. She can see. She can see Axel hunched over, at the bannister of the staircase, holding his head and bleeding profusely. His green jacket stained with deep, deep red as gore spills to the floor.

As quick as she can, she brings out her sword, with a potion in the other hand. As Axel stands there, in pain, she throws another potion; and his loud groans of agony are slowed down to an almost hilarious degree. Green and black bubbles float into the air as she prepares to strike.

But she herself ends up struck down.

The first thing she recognizes is a burning slash down her back, then her screams, then - as she whips around, her sword ready - the pigman that attacked her. There are several more behind it, or maybe there aren’t. The world is spinning and she feels so light and clumsy. It hurts. It disgusts her. Her grip on her sword is weak, but she swings at the pigmen anyway, and some of them get hurt, but they return the favor just the same.

There’s so many. They all have golden swords.

She has her back against the wall until she runs into Axel’s room, hitting every pigman that trickles in with her sword until it falls over into ash. The droning of the music box is incessant. Everything around her is spinning. It hurts, it hurts so much.

At some point, she’s gathered enough of herself to push the pigmen back outside, barricading the door with the few remaining blocks she has. She wastes no time in scarfing down as many potatoes as she needs. Her head still hurts, but the renewed energy is enough for her to ignore it. With borrowed time, she turns around trying to find something, _anything_ , she could use.

The music box is useless. It’s a tune she doesn’t understand, one she’s not familiar enough with to know its worth. There are papers everywhere, but they’re not notes. Journal entries, perhaps, but her head aches too much to read; and the pounding of the pigmen on the door isn’t helping her ringing ears.

There’s nothing useful in the chests, she knows that. She moves ahead to Axel’s desk, throwing aside the music box as she sweeps the surface, looking for what he was sulking over. She almost gives up when all she can find are papers and pictures, but something catches her eye. A glint in the moonlight. A blinding, blinking flash of a light.

Something that was buried beneath the pictures.

She kneels down and shuffles through the memorabilia, finding pictures upon pictures of Axel, pre-virus, and another man, with darker skin in a blue sweater.

“That’s Jesse.”

They’re smiling and laughing. Some of the pictures are just of Jesse. Some have another person - Olivia - joining them. They’re bunched together in her hands, memories of something long gone that she can only look at with a stranger’s context.

(Her head is throbbing. Her sight is going foggy with tears. Everything hurts and she’s bleeding.

The hivemind of swine roar, and they pound, and they beat, and they snort. They bleed.)

They don’t mean anything.

She throws them away, returning to what she was looking for from the start. It was hidden beneath the papers and the pictures and the droning, annoying music box.

But now it sat there, gleaming, exposed in the moonlight.

It was a rod. A green, glowing, humming rod; just like the others. It’s alive, _very much alive_ , humming just like the silver rod she found when encountering the enderman, and the red rod Olivia spawned into her inventory.

_It’s here._

A noise louder than the ringing or the droning crashed through, a chorus of undead groans that only sent waves of nausea and pain throughout her body. She turned, sword in hand, ready to fight; but was greeted with the Order’s resident griefer, a golden sword gripped tight in his hands.

Before she knows it, it’s dug into her chest, and everything fades into numb pain and nothingness until the last thing she sees is Axel’s cold, hard glare.

* * *

“Cassie!”

It’s the first thing she hears. It acts like a cure, that voice, saying her name. A comfort. A security blanket.

Everything comes in after that, things she can recognize. Her senses return to her. The solid ground beneath her, the burning pain coursing through her from her back; the sound of cackling flames, the feel of the moonlight. The groaning of pigmen.

Her eyes shoot open, and she panics and scrambles to get away upon the sight of a flaming zombie pigman. The memories flood back, then. She remembers everything, remembers the pigmen and the burning alley, and Axel killing her in his room. She remembers the pictures and the music box. She remembers the green rod.

It doesn’t take much. Aiden doesn’t need to say anything for her to run through the alley, to weave through the tentacles, to break the window and infiltrate the temple through the West Wing. She sees Axel’s shadow and runs, and she repairs all her weapons, and she fights.

When she finds Axel in his room, instead of going down to the kitchen, she charges in, yelling and screaming and swinging her axe. It’s all a wasted effort, though, as he takes her down easily and kills her within minutes. And she wakes back up to Aiden’s voice and burning pigmen.

She tries all over again.

She tries and tries, and it’s a never-ending cycle, never a dull moment as she tries to end Axel once and for all. The alley, the tentacles, the window, the corridor. It keeps going. 

The alley, the tentacles, the window, the corridor. The kitchen, the laboratory, the room.

But there’s no way. Axel always beats her, sending her axe flying back at her, sending hordes of pigmen to gang up on her and back her into a corner. She’s fallen down the stairs, stabbed clean through, bled to death in the armory.

It’s tiring.

It’s enough for her to feel tempted to just lay there, when she wakes up, and let the pigman kill her. Let her burn and bleed as she’s beaten and kicked and stabbed.

“Cassie!”

He tells her to run. His voice is always there, when she needs it most, when she asks for help. He tells her to run, so she does.

“Cassie!”

Everything hurts. She wants it to stop.

* * *

“What if I give up?”

It’s a question she asks herself, but she doesn’t know where. It’s dark. The lights of the basement are warm, but they’re very, very dim. The wooden floor beneath her creaks, but nobody comes.

She feels so alone.

“What if I just leave?”

She wants it to stop. She wants everything to stop. She wants something different.

“You can try,” Aiden says, urging her on, “There’s no harm in trying.”

(Beyond actually dying.)

Deep breaths.

Inhale, exhale

In, out

Deep, heavy breaths.

Food stocked up in her inventory, durable weaponry, and a full bar of health.

She’ll risk it.

“Okay.”

Cassie takes the potions, then leaves, going up the stairs and stopping at the ground floor. She gives the stairwell going to the second floor a meaningful glance and thinks about going in again, about taking the rod and finally defeating Axel, but she turns away.

“It’s not worth it. Just go.”

So she does.

She runs for the doors and pushes them open, stepping into the cold air. Leaving the dock and the unlit beacon, the tentacles and the lava and the decay and gore, she runs out of Beacontown.

Suddenly, a roar of pain pierces the quiet. It sends shockwaves through the air, rushing winds pushing Cassie to the ground with a yelp. It doesn’t last for long, and soon enough a blanket of dead silence weighs itself over the atmosphere; and it feels almost suffocating.

When Cassie gets up, she stares in shock at the temple, where she knows the bellow originated from. If Beacontown wasn’t dead before, it did now. She could _feel_ it, feel the dense tension of emptiness permeating the air. Suddenly, everything was _gone_.

“What was that?” Aiden finally asked. He was trembling in shock and fear.

“I-”

The words escaped her.

She screamed when the moonlight suddenly vanished, and a large, dark shadow flew over Beacontown. It was loud, roaring and large wings audible as they flapped, the volume to an almost earth-shattering degree. Cassie had to consciously dig her feet to the ground to keep upright, consumed with awe and horror as she watched the dragon swoop over town, then _dive_ right into the temple. Against her expectations, nothing fell apart or exploded. Rather, the dragon just _disappeared_ into thin air. It was gone upon impact with the temple.

The girl could only stare and blink at the phenomenon, unable to say a word as it reappeared and shot back out of the temple. It flew into the night sky, fading away into the unreal venta black.

The rushing winds eventually subsided, and the air was still once more. Colder and less heavy, but empty all the same.

(Just… a different kind of empty.

But she couldn’t describe it.)

Aiden repeated his questions of confusion and horror, but Cassie couldn’t answer them. “What was that?? What just happened!?”

She had no answers.

Despite herself, she ran back inside. Aiden’s protests fell on deaf ears as she returned to where she had just escaped from, as she sprinted up the flight of stairs and arrived at Axel’s room. It was quiet again, dead silent; and it felt as if she truly was out of place in this old building. Nobody else was inside now, she knew that.

Axel’s room confirmed it.

He was gone. His room was a mess, just like before, but it felt different this time. It felt abandoned. It felt like a grave.

(That’s what this whole place was. A grave.)

The music box wasn’t even playing anymore. All the pain was gone. It was just… nothing, now. ‘Numbness’ wouldn’t even be the right word for the atmosphere.

Maybe there wasn’t a right word for it.

The pictures were still there. She recognized the images of Axel, Jesse, and Olivia; the cameos of their other friends, past homes and builds and trophies. She put the apocalyptic memorabilia aside in favor of what she really wanted, buried beneath the pile and now, exposed, glinting in the moonlight.

The green rod.

It was dull now, as dead as Axel and as cold as the night air. It was outright _freezing_ in her fingers, it almost hurt.

She stared at it, feeling numb as her head hung low.

“That was it?” She mumbled, “That was all I had to do? Just leave?”

Aiden’s hesitant breathing was audible through the feedback. “I guess so,” came his defeated reply.

That was it.

* * *

**5**

Cassie screamed and threw the green rod at the wall, letting the fragile thing shatter into pieces and fall to the ground.

“ _WHAT THE HELL?!_ ”

A waste of time. “This was all just a waste of time!”

She could have just left?

“I went through ALL OF THAT just to find out that LEAVING would have killed him?! That’s it!? I just had to leave him alone!?”

The words spilled out of her in frustrated yells and screams, unadulterated and raw. Her voice and throat felt sore as she cried and took her anger out on the table, on the chest, on hurting herself as she kicked at everything she could. Every death came back to her, and every one only made her angrier.

“THIS IS SO STUPID!”

She stayed there for a very long time.

.

Eventually, her anger ran out. Eventually, she was kneeling in the middle of Axel’s wrecked room, everything around her broken and shattered beyond repair. Eventually, all she could do was breathe as all she was left with was numb exhaustion.

“I’m sorry, Cassie,” Aiden said to her meekly.

She couldn’t bring herself to mute him. Her frustrations were gone.

She closed her eyes and sighed.

* * *

With not another look behind her, Cassie left Beacontown, taking the fragments of the green rod and a bow, crossbow, and stacks of special arrows with her. “Not enough compensation for all that bullshit,” she said, much to Aiden’s stifled amusement.

(Hearing him laugh was a bit of a comfort. She decided to take it.)

The dragon flew north-west, away from Beacontown. She followed. There were five pieces to the amulet, and she had four. There was one left.

“Are you sure about this, Cassie?”

She’d walked tirelessly – for how long, she couldn’t tell – and arrived at a valley. Two volcanoes stood tall at either side, dormant, asleep; and at the end of the valley, at the other side, was a forest.

“I’m sure.”

Cassie walks the valley calmly and quietly, her energy slowly returning with each stride, every breath taken of the cool air. She ignores everything around her, letting the environment become vague, blurry colors in her peripheral as she focused on the path ahead of her, on the forest.

It’s just like the other woods she had to wade through, cramped and cold and dirty. The trees all around her are birch, made of smeared tracks of dried blood and graffitied with screaming, wailing faces. They mean nothing to her, really, but the color of white is a refreshing sight after all the blues and greens she had to withstand before. The darker shade of the leaves is almost calming and tranquil, accompanied by the cool breeze.

Eventually, she found what she was looking for. A small clearing. A small mound.

A sword, bleeding orange, surrounded by soil and bones.

She doesn’t hesitate, and reaches forward to hold the hilt.

It bursts into flames just like before, but she withstands it this time. She holds onto the hilt with a tight, firm grip. It burns her, and it hurts, but in the flames she feels alive. She hadn’t realized her eyes were closed until she opened them again, to look at the little fire in her hands.

It’s comforting. The warmth, the burning – it wraps itself around her like a blanket.

The fire calms down. It’s almost sudden how it does, but it doesn’t startle her anymore. She lets go of the hilt and looks down at her palm, open and bleeding and burnt.

But that’s fine.

She bandages her hand, takes a bite of food, and moves on, without a care for how much she’s hurting. She treads forward, one step after the other, through the path set by the dispersing trees.

Eventually, she finds it.

Cassie stands at the edge of the cliff, letting herself marvel at the sight of the wide expanse of land; a desert made of endstone, against a deep, dark void.

It’s beautiful. It really is.

Overhead, the dragon roars.


	6. Lvpbttpvx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the beginning, there was something wrong with her.
> 
> She’d spawned as a child. She didn’t know why she did, or that it was uncommon until she was told, but she knew that something had gone wrong.
> 
> She just couldn’t pinpoint what.
> 
> But she knows now.
> 
> She knows everything now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> feel like i should thank my friends for being so encouraging and believing in me n shit while this finale's been stuck in development hell  
> so. thanks guys. North. Winslow. Zombie.  
> they're great. you guys are great.  
> thank you.
> 
> here's the end of Balikbayan, finally.

**0**

That day, the breeze was gentle and cool, a light chill rustling through the greens of forests and overgrowth. As it climbed to the noon point, the sun overlooked long coats and ruffles of hair flowing in the wind, a group of scientists huddled under a tent.

“Ready?”

Shared glances between friends, coworkers. Anticipation. Determination. A small nod.

A hand hovering over a button.

“On three.”

“One-”

Command Blocks waiting patiently beneath the surface,

“Two-”

threaded together with redstone and code, seconds away from detonation,

“Three-”

 _Execution_.

And right that second, the button was pushed, and pulses, waves of code rippled through the world.

Right that second, reality was poisoned.

Right that second, the dominoes began to fall.

Right that second, a little girl fell from the sky, knocked unconscious by the current.

* * *

“She’s here.”

Olivia turns and peers up at the cliffs of Pneumonoultra. The girl’s silhouette is clear, as she stands at the edge, overlooking the End.

“She’s going to come fight, isn’t she?”

Jesse’s voice is small and afraid, a soft mumble barely audible in the vast, endless void and the howling, rushing winds of poisoned air.

She turns to her friend and pulls him close, wrapping him in a comforting embrace.

“It’ll be okay,” she whispers to him, “I promise.”

“How do you know?” He whimpers weakly, “She already killed everyone else. What if she kills you, too?”

“She won’t,” Olivia says firmly, “And I won’t let her get to you either.”

The boy looks at her with a frown, doubt settling in his clouded eyes.

The conviction in her voice sounded forced.

* * *

Cassie soaks in the view.

The End - or rather, this imitation of it - was absolutely breathtaking. It was a large expanse of nothing but sand and void. The endstone desert stretched for miles, before disappearing in a horizon of nothing. Four obsidian spires stood all and proud, reaching into the dark sky, the crystals at the very top looking like stars with the frozen moon.

Here, there are no more shadows, as there is no more light. There is no darkness either. It’s just a place now. A state. Frozen in time, yet also left to age and rot and become… nothing. It just _exists_.

It is embodiment, culmination, a representation of everything that happened to this place. A landscape of amalgamations and corruptions.

The End.

It was… almost overwhelming, seeing it all before her. Exhilarating.

“Cassie?”

Of course, Aiden pulls her back before she lets herself be consumed completely. It’s funny how she didn’t even realize she was losing herself, up until his voice punctured through the droning, hypnotizing aura of the End; in tune with the deadpan hum of Lunacy’s soul, still sitting mindlessly in her inventory.

An ambiance that permeated the air of the abyss.

A soft song emanating from the crystals.

“Cass?”

She shook out of her daze. “Yeah? I’m here.”

“Are you gonna be okay?” He asks her.

“Yeah,” she says, uncertain.

“...Do you see that?”

“See what?” Her eyes flickered up to the tops of the spires, the End Crystals floating, twinkling and glittering in their own light. “Those?”

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“I…” Aiden bit his lip, “I don’t think they work like _actual_ End Crystals.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean- I don’t think they heal him. Jesse, I mean,” he explained, “I think the virus transformed Jesse into a dragon, but he’s not actually _the_ Ender Dragon.”

“So you’re saying I can get rid of him faster?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath, thinking on this information.

(Jesse wasn’t the Ender Dragon, but he sure as hell resembles it. His home looks like the End. He made the End Crystals - but they’re not _the_ actual crystals.

 _So why are they there?_ )

Something moves at the campfire behind her, a rustle of bushes and a shuffle of feet interrupting her train of thought. With no hesitation, Cassie turns around, to be met by a girl in white.

A _familiar_ girl in white.

The girl in white she first met so long ago, the one crying on the fountain.

Her sudden appearance surprises her.

Her lip trembles. She quivers where she stands, her wide, green eyes tearing up from beneath a curtain of black hair. Despite the soft light of the bonfire and the moon, her opacity shifts, her form flickering in an unstable manner. Her hair, so long and silky and trailing all around her, occasionally reverts to a waist-length cut, bangs framing her face.

She could be called the embodiment of innocence.

(And in a way, she was.)

Cassie stares at the girl, waiting for her to make a move or speak.

The silence passed. As she waited, she took in more of the girl, taking in her features, her name, her eyes - and she realized that the girl hasn’t been returning her gaze. Cassie was staring into her eyes - but the girl was actively avoiding it, staring at _the rest of her_ instead.

“Why?” The girl - Aya - finally asks in a small, terrified voice, “Why did you kill them?”

“...Kill who?”

The girl gasps, and her tears finally fall, slipping down her cheek and dripping into nothing; the silent drops never meeting the ground. They fizzle out of existence before they could.

She’s trembling even more now, unattended feelings boiling beneath the surface. “Did you even know who they were?”

Confusion, fury, frustration, mourning; they flowed through her, through her every word, responsible for every tear shed. She quivers and shakes as her feelings torment her. As she realizes the truth, plain in sight before her eyes.

Cassie watches on, hearing the girl’s words and taking them in - but she does nothing about them. Her mind goes cloudy as she thinks, the question resurrecting old memories and unvoiced thoughts that bounce around the echo chamber, making her head pound. She doesn’t even realize she’s in a haze, too caught up in the reminiscence, until Aiden’s voice breaks through the fog. He says her name, and she’s pulled back into consciousness.

But it was too late. That was all Aya needed to charge in with a cry.

* * *

Cassie barely has time to dodge, ending up clumsily stumbling away. She hisses at the pain in her palm as she lands on her hands, rocks digging into her loosely bandaged palm, as she pushes herself up and avoids another attack from the girl.

She pulls out a sword just as Aya came in for a third strike, glaring daggers as their blades meet, her green eyes boring into Cassie’s. In that instant, she realizes that the girl’s dress is gone, replaced instead by old, worn armor; a dark grey lined with red and gold, now muted by age and dented in several areas. Her hair has returned to a reasonable shoulder length, and in her bangs, there’s a strip of yellow.

Distantly, the dragon roared.

Cassie’s eyes widen when she absorbs the girl’s image, and she stares back at her, examining her bright, green eyes; wondering what secrets they might hold.

All of a sudden, Aya shuts her eyes and pushes herself away, and Cassie nearly tumbles from the sudden movement, but gathers herself before she could fall. She grips her sword tight, preparing for another attack; ignoring the blood seeping and dripping from her hand. This time, she’s prepared as Aya comes in swinging once again, coming close enough to land a blow on Cassie; but she manages to block the attack.

They’re locked at an impasse as the battle continues; strike after strike, she parries each and every one, and Aya does the same. Both girls are equally skilled. When one lands a hit, another is quickly dealt back, the girl quick to get back up on her feet and continue the cycle.

“There has to be a way to get the upper hand _somehow_ ,” Cassie thinks, as the fight goes on. She’s gained a few scratches in that time, but nothing too severe. She’s dealt the same amount of damage to her opponent. There didn’t seem to be any way of winning or losing.

Aiden doesn’t seem to have any ideas.

The girls dance in circles around the campsite, gaining and losing the upper hand as the fight continues. Sparks from their meeting blades fly, joining the embers of the fire as the wind blows.

It becomes a blur, a meaningless smear of images as Aya continues to flicker, and Cassie tries to finally take her down. It’s almost hypnotizing, as the silence of the End is filled with their grunts and their blades; the scuffling of shoes against the dirt and rustling bushes; their gasps, the sharp sounds of a cut being opened on skin; the droplets of blood. Cassie gets lost in it as she moves in auto-pilot, becoming transfixed with the colors and the lights; the shine of their enchanted blades and the reflection of the moonlight; the embers of the fire and Aya’s bright, green eyes.

They never look back at her.

_Again._

“What the hell?” She thinks, “How is she fighting me? Why isn’t she looking at me?”

But she is. She looks _at_ Cassie, but she doesn’t return her gaze, denying her vulnerability as she hacks and slashes at her; blocking the entrance, so she can’t come in.

Her eyes are nothing but a blur. An old painting she can’t even begin to understand.

The revelation upsets her.

With an anguished cry, she swings her sword hard in Aya’s direction, the girl barely dodging before she turns and strikes back. Cassie jumps back, leaving but a graze on her jacket. She is unfettered, as she charges again and slashes at the girl. This time, she cried out, a critical hit landed on her shoulder. Cassie takes out her blade, letting the blood splatter, as she swings again. Aya blocks it this time, struggling and grimacing from the pain as more pressure is applied to her wound, Cassie digging her blade into Aya’s. Eventually, Aya gives, falling away and allowing another hit from Cassie. More wounds are opened. Her image glitches violently.

Until, all of a sudden, she shrieks, startling Cassie just enough to distract her as she lunges forward, tackling the girl and causing them both to fall over the cliff, losing both their weapons in the process. Blood flies and spills everywhere as they tumble down the slope, Aya’s hands gripping Cassie tight, her dull, rotting nails digging into her scalp and neck. Cassie cries out and struggles, but her efforts are repeatedly undone by the harsh fall, as Aya digs her head into the gravel, moving her hands to grab at her ears.

Her head hurts.

Everything hurts.

It becomes so…. overwhelming.

(But it was always overwhelming.

...She’d hate to admit that she cried.)

* * *

* * *

**1**

She lands gracelessly in the snow, but is quick to recover, her injuries trivial as she gets back into the fight.

There is no time for weakness.

Sunlight gleams in the diamond shovel she holds tight, and it flickers as she digs the snow beneath her competitors. She could feel the ~~yellow, burning~~ eyes of the ~~Nightmare~~ Old Builders on her, their judgement and their fear burning holes into her as she slashed at the others, leapt from place to place and shoved her enemies into the traps they made to kill her.

Moi irbki hf alv yamoik il dltt ybies alv weoppbsa nvbn, poem dkpzxs alv mo dlii ghprz.

The grinder beneath them beat like a heart; a booming, thundering, agonizingly slow _thump-thump_ over the sizzling pool of lava. Several voices screaming their helplessness were lost to it, as the snow gave way and gravity pulled them down. The heart continued relentlessly, without fail, doing as it was told to like an obedient servant. A program.

But the pace quickened. The program came alive.

Everything fell apart.

 _Thump-thump thump-thump_ , as it shoved the first of many spawns into the conversion chamber. _Thump-thump thump-thump_ as it broke its confines, shattered glass and cut fake skin, and rigged the temple to crumble behind it.

_Thump-thump thump-thump_

_Thump-thump-thump-thump_

(Aya’s body rots away.)

**_Thump-thump-thump-thump._ **

(Staring at Cassie as she slashed and screamed relentlessly at everything around her. Looking for an outlet, for a release for her anger. Looking for catharsis.

She could never catch her eyes.

There’s always her hair blocking her view. There’s always her glasses keeping her bound and weakened. There’s always the fire that surrounds her getting in the way - the damage, the hurt that she does nothing to heal, the pain she causes others. A blazing red and black, burnt clumps flying as she moved like a whirlwind, much too fast for anybody to catch. Out of control and unable to tame.)

**_Thump-thump-thump-thump._ **

(Buried in the snow, the broken pieces of black plastic and fuzz in her hand, everything becomes a hazy blur. Faraway, muffled stimuli.

It all becomes… a little too much to comprehend.

Too much thinking.. and maybe.. she should stop now.)

**_Thump-thump-thump-thump_ **

(As it all fades away)

**_Thump-thump-thump-thump_ **

(As the last of her mind, her consciousness, registers White,)

**_Thump-thump-thump-thump_ **

(Aya hopes she did something right.)

**_Thump-thump-thump-_ **

“Cassie, look out!” Aiden cried.

Cassie leapt away before the enemy behind her could drop her into the grinder. She whipped around to face her opponent, sea-green eyed and blond, and couldn’t help the adrenaline and euphoria that coursed through her as she swung her axe his way.

* * *

Lukas’ soul burned green as he dodged her every attack. She could see it spark and burn in his translucent ‘body,’ tendrils of light holding together the cheap imitation of what he used to be. It was nothing more than a rented copy, a temporary replacement for one more act.

(An understudy or a body-double wouldn’t be the right words - no, that was for something else.)

But this was still Lukas in front of her. This was the enderman she first met, tall and towering and screaming, charred black with burning. She could still see it clear-as-day, no matter how much the illusion tried to bring him back.

His soul was all that was acting now, here in this corrupted world. He was running on fumes - they all were.

Cassie adjusted her pumpkin of a helmet as Lukas slashed at her and missed, landing nary a scratch on her signature headwear. She grinned devilishly as she switched her axe for a bow and arrow and, without missing a beat, sent venom flying his way. The facsimile of a writer cried out as it punctured his essence and poisoned his veins, and his heart beat in a panic - _thump-thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump!_

As he was distracted, she made a run for it, breaking through a painting and making more distance between them before she fired more shots. The enderman screamed as it dodged some and tumbled to others. The arrows flying hissed like snakes as they whizzed through the air, tips biting into Lukas’ being and poisoning him further.

It was cathartic, to get to do this without the distraction of Old Builders or husks; it could even be a moment she’d like to immortalize in a painting, or a poster, but it wasn’t enough. All this was doing was slowing him down.

“Cassie-”

“On it!”

She booked it for the tower, the first of many that she’d have to eliminate. It stood tall before her, as high as the sky and then some, although it was just about ready to crumble to dust. The earth quaked beneath her with a roar, the dragon flying over her watching her every move.

He was _desperate_ . Desperate to get rid of her. Desperate to keep her away from his precious keepsakes. Oh, she could _laugh_ at all of his efforts.

“Cass, you better get going,” Aiden reminds her. His voice loud in her ear, crinkling through the feedback, “Lukas is on your tail.”

Stacks of dirt in her inventory, sharpened claws, bleeding nails.

She grinned, “Don’t worry about me. I’m on it.”

And climbed.

* * *

Cassie scaled the spire, building her way up and clinging to the obsidian as she did. The dragon knew what she was doing and was trying everything he could to stop her, sending balls of fire that she quickly sent flying back. He evaded it as easily as he sent it, curling away and flying the moment he sent another.

The routine continued, and the spire was tall.

“You have to find a way to slow him down,” Aiden said, “Maybe shoot at him from time to time?”

Cassie growled as she swung at the fireball, sending it back to the dragon. “You think I have time for that!?”

“Do you have any other option?”

Not any that she could think of, at the moment.

She seethed. “ _Fine._ ”

Wasting not another minute, she whirled and fired poisoned arrows at the beast, just as he was about to send another ball of flames. He cried out, the bullets embedding themselves into his skin, and for a moment his wings faltered, and he staggered in midair.

Cassie grinned as she built the rest of the way up to the spire. She did it again and again, sending the meteors back at him and firing venom as much as she had to to get to the top. Eventually, she was met with iron bars. Her grin split her face as she heard the hum of the crystal, just ahead.

The girl took the iron bars in her hands, gripping them tight, then tore them apart, letting the pieces fly as she slithered into the cage.

She came face to face with the crystal, which glowed a whole spectrum of color, making a chorus of noise; melodious humming, high-pitched whistling, ear-piercing screaming…

“What is it?” She wondered aloud.

“I think… I think these are souls,” Aiden said, “Like the soul of Lukas, that he left behind when he died. Like Lunacy’s soul in your inventory.”

“But who are they?”

“I think these are the people who were changed by the virus. I think they all died a long time ago.”

Cassie stared at the crystal incredulously. “You’re saying Jesse collected every person’s soul after they died?”

“Possibly.”

(‘Well, he missed one,’ she thinks briefly, the orb in her inventory humming along with her.)

“You think this is the case for all the other crystals?”

“Definitely.”

Cassie hummed and nodded, staring at the crystal intently, listening to the sounds emanating from it.

(They pleaded for their suffering to end. They asked why everything happened the way they did. They cried for answers, and they sobbed in mourning.

Why them?)

“I see.”

It was perfect for the End.

Cassie swung her axe and broke the crystal, letting the souls explode and shatter into nothing.

* * *

* * *

**2**

She flew through the air and saw naught.

When things went by so quickly, they became intangible, merely passing lights that have lost their meaning. Cassie hesitated to call them “images” as they were nothing more than colors and sensations. Smears of red and black and white, forming whirlpools of purple and pink. They looked like nebulae, ones that didn’t last any longer than a second, as they exploded and turned into mere specks of pastel colors, soft yet burning bright. Baby blues and baby pinks and baby yellows, blinding in white flames.

There were noises too. The howling wind, the dramatic screaming and wailing and crying and arguing. It was all so hard to listen to and decipher, to pinpoint and differentiate one from the other. Perhaps that was the goal: to create an echo chamber of meaningless words, fighting, circling back and again, looping over and over until something stopped it.

Something like an impact, like blunt force trauma, like a loud gunshot that rang all throughout, cutting through the air and leaving silence - nobody - behind.

Behind Cassie was the void, the “nothing,” the silence left behind by the careless bullet. She landed in the sand, just at the edge of the mainland, just at the edge of falling over to an abnormal death.

“Cassie?! Are you there!?”

Of course, she wouldn’t fall over. She wouldn’t allow herself to.

“I’m here.”

With one of four spires gone, the dragon cried, his grief bellowing in the stagnant air of the End. She could feel his burning glare on her, bright, bright purple blazing with rage and frustration; his efforts being destroyed right in front of him. Cassie followed his form, watching as he flew over the realm. She grinned devilishly. He huffed childishly.

The next spire was a straight path just ahead of her, but it was blocked. The dragon had called in for more reinforcements, it seems, if Petra and Lukas standing in her way was any indication.

But that was fine.

**_Thump-thump thump-thump._ **

She could handle them.

* * *

Petra’s soul gleamed and glowed a bright yellow, almost to an uncomfortable degree, in the dankness of the End. Light smeared as the trader swung her golden sword, but it was obvious that with every strike, every block, every parry; Cassie had the upper hand.

After all, between the two of them, she was the only one actually still alive.

Lukas was firing from a distance this time, having learned his lesson after his attempt at melee with her. He shot arrows continuously, his quiver infinite, his aim almost impeccable if it weren’t for Cassie always dodging at the last minute.

And it became difficult to shoot when she was so close to Petra.

Cassie could laugh when she saw the split-second panic that contorted their faces as she pulled her opponent towards her, the wide-eyed horror in Lukas’ eyes when his arrow dug itself into his friend’s back. It made direct contact with Petra’s soul, entangled in the tendrils and spreading cracks. With the dying girl in her grip, she poisoned her as well, and watched with glee as her yellow soul was contaminated by dark, inky black. Lukas had stopped firing by then, distracted by his concern over his friend, who he quickly rushed to, with a sword drawn and aimed for Cassie.

The White Pumpkin, however, quickly fled from the scene, making a break for the spire as Petra collapsed. The dragon roared in anger, and spat out another ball of fire. The shockwaves of its landing pushed her away and knocked her into the ground, but when she looked up, she found herself by a wall of obsidian: the next spire.

She laughed as she sensed the dragon’s regret and furthered frustration.

( _It’s just one mistake after another with you._ )

Cassie prepared to climb again but was quickly distracted by an egg, thrown straight at her head, a quickly-mutating chick breaking out of it. She whipped around to the source, her breath hitching upon the sight of Axel, glaring down at her from a hill far away. His gas mask was gone now, as were his injuries; his “healed” body was translucent, showing off his soul that glowed orange as bright as flame, the tendrils and the orb burning just as so. His presence seemed to stand out in the End, gleaming bright in the lifeless abyss.

Cassie grumbled. It was almost enough to distract her from the TNT cannon standing behind him.

As Axel prepared to throw another egg - his other hand on the lever - Cassie took out her diamond pick. “I died to you before,” she growled, “I won’t ever again!”

And she struck the spire. Obsidian shattered to pieces within seconds, simultaneous with an egg breaking on her shoulder. She ignored it, shooting venom blindly to keep Axel at bay as she broke more of the obsidian spire’s base.

Just as she was getting to the inner layer, the sounds of redstone mechanisms and the hiss of TNT reached her ears - her eyes widened, she gasped, and for a second, she froze - and she barely had enough time to get to the other side of the spire to dodge the bomb. Cassie had to cling to the obsidian to keep from being blown away.

The TNT made a giant pit right where she was standing.

“Shit!”

“You can still get inside if you hurry!” Aiden encouraged her. She decided to take his advice, nodding without another word and hurrying to the bottom of the pit. The endstone felt shaky underneath her feet, the sand crumbling away with each step, smoking, filling her nose with gunpowder.

“Shit.” She took in shaky breaths. She felt like she was suffocating. “He blew it to the lowest layer.”

“That’s fine, just keep going!”

Right. This was fine.

As quick as she could, she climbed up to where the pit reached under the spire. She could hear Axel prepare another attack - **_thump_** click **_thump thump_** \- **_thump_** _hisss_ **_thump thump_** \- fueling her to move faster. She ditched the pickaxe and reached for the obsidian herself, nudging it closer, lower, with the tips of her nails and once it was close enough, she reached for it, gripped it tight and _pulled!_

The obsidian easily crumbled away, crashing into the fragile endstone floor and leaving a gaping hole in its wake, as it fell into the abyss, quickly despawning.

(Cassie watched it happen with wide eyes, adrenaline and fear coursing through her, her blood pumping like crazy and her heart drumming an annoying beat, thrumming, pounding in her head.

Everything felt so _surreal_.

She found herself grinning as tears fell.)

The TNT was flying. It was coming for her.

Like an insect, she crawled into the space just big enough for her to fit, now cramped in the hollow inside of the spire. Her fingers bled as she clung to the obsidian, trying to keep from falling into the abyss past the pit. _She had to climb._

(Humid inside the spire. Hot, hot, hot - uncomfortable, squeamish — covered in dried blood and gunk, stuffy air inside. Teeth grit, head aching, chest hurting; bleeding, hurting fingers -)

She reached for the obsidian above her and crushed it in her fist.

* * *

Like the feeling of splinters buried in her hand.

A young, fresh spawn like any other. One who had just woken up and was starting out - punching a tree, obviously, to get wood; for fire, for crafting, for weaponry. To survive. To thrive.

Getting their hands bloody for the first time. Getting hurt. Gaining scars - the first of many. They did it out of survival, and that’s what they gained.

...A sensation she never got to experience.

An experience robbed from her.

Her first sensation wasn’t the light of the dawn on her face, or the breeze picking up and flowing through her hair. She first felt uncomfortable, stuffy heat. She first felt the need to wriggle and squirm around, wrapped in a blanket and suffocating, begging to escape and be freed, but going ignored until she eventually passed out.

She woke up to a world of darkness. Of metal and cold and selfishness. She woke up to the plastic, fake face of a man who wouldn’t hesitate to make something his.

* * *

_To take what is hers._

The spire trembles, shaking Cassie inside it with every bomb Axel throws its way. The dragon sent fireballs of his own, now larger, harsher, burning brighter than before.

She could tell that somebody died - which meant her poison worked.

Cassie couldn’t help but internally celebrate her achievement.

“Not now, Cass,” Aiden reprimanded her, “Later.”

Later.

She mined her way up to the top, letting the obsidian fall into her inventory as she dug through. Miraculously, despite her numb, blood-caked fingers, she hadn’t fallen into the void just yet. There were hiccups and moments where she feared she might have plummeted to her death, but she held on.

(It felt almost impossible to fall.)

But she mustn't get ahead of herself.

Nothing the dragon nor the rogue could do would stop her from making it to the top, her determination as indestructible as obsidian; and soon enough she made it to the top of the spire, ripping out the floor from above her. She climbed out with a heave, and in no time at all, she was greeted by the crystal.

Just like the other one, it screamed, the collection of souls wailing in their brilliant mess of colors. Bright, as blinding and terrifying as the galaxy and its stars, the faraway planets, the nebulae and the black holes.

(Distant crying. Distant sobs that nobody would hear, falling to deaf ears in the vacuum. Too quiet, yet too loud - preaching to the choir, because all the people who could do something about their suffering left them to die.

They were crying out for help to each other, all of them powerless, all of them stuck.)

Far away, Cassie could hear the sound of Lukas preparing his bow. The draw of the string, the click of the arrow, the feather in his scratched, bloodied fingers. His heavy breathing and his hardened eyes, glaring up at the shadow on the spire.

She turned to him and the sorrows of the crystal dissipated, as she grinned and let him take his shot. The moment he did, she jumped off, tumbling through the air and being knocked back by the shockwaves of the second crystal’s destruction.

Those souls’ sorrows silenced, the dragon roared, and regret taking hold of his heart, Lukas froze.

* * *

* * *

**3**

Like he did every. single. time.

When things went to shit, he could never do a damn thing to save a life. He always froze up. He always fucked up. Even when he could jump in to save the day, his efforts were wasted. Pointless.

Just like him.

Cassie landed within walking distance of him, and she could tell how quickly he realized he was screwed. He was clearly desperate, firing arrows aimlessly and missing her with every shot. Time was short — within seconds, she had him in her grasp, her nails digging into his translucent skin.

He closes his eyes shut. He struggled against her, trying to wriggle out of her grasp; shouting, yelling for his friends. She could hear them coming, hear them screaming his name.

_No._

Wasting not another second, she pried his eyelids open and pinned them there, keeping his eyes wide and gaping as she stared down into the panicking, sea-green abyss. They still darted everywhere, looking at anything but her, but that was easily remedied. She isolated him from the rest of the world, wrapping them in darkness until it was just her and him, and there was nothing else for him to look at. No way to struggle.

It was just them.

And he finally looked back at her, his eyes meeting hers.

And tears sprung.

His eyes went wet with tears, his breathing going ragged, whimpers of, “No, no,” breathed uselessly as his begging for release went ignored. Cassie, meanwhile, _revelled_ in it, absorbing every minute detail of this feeling. The recognition of his consciousness, his acknowledgement of hers; the green soul of his that shrivelled up as Lukas was frozen in place. The fear, the regret, the anger, the pain — they were most apparent when looking into his eyes.

She could see a castle burning in the sky. She could see a yellow patch carelessly tossed away. She could see fireworks, a lit beacon changing colors.

She could see it all. It was as if she was staring into an exposed document, all this data free for her perusal.

For a moment, it was thrilling, exciting, _exhilarating_ , this power she had in her hands.

But then the feeling disappeared, reduced to withering, aging stone. Just like Lukas, who now remained in place, forever staring up in terror at a monster, frozen by horror and fear and his past consuming him.

Looking at it now, Casse thinks it would make an interesting portrait, a piece of art one could install in a museum for theorists to ogle at; but something felt wrong. Something felt… hollow.

This moment should feel monumental. It should have been glorious.

But it’s not. Not anymore.

Even as the frozen statue sits in front of her now, she still feels… empty. As if a high ran dry, a flame snuffed out.

It’s **_frustrating_ **.

It bursts in a spark, and she gives out an angry yell as she smashes the butt of her axe against the head, destroying the statue and letting the thing crumble to pieces in front of her. It’s loud, as jagged rocks fall on top of each other in a pile, tumbling and rolling and being loud and clunky and rough.

And _still_ , even that felt underwhelming. Unfulfilling. A pit in her chest, a waste of time. A meaningless cacophony of foreign sounds in her head.

Even with the man responsible for this, dead... It’s actually fucking insane how that didn’t calm her down at all.

That can only mean she’s not done yet. There’s still Axel left, and Jesse, and Olivia. She needs to finish this. She needs the noises to stop.

So she turns around and doesn't offer the dead rubble a second thought, eager to finish off the rogue that killed her so many times at Beacontown.

* * *

Axel had moved to a different spot, to the top of one of the broken spires, staring down at her and waiting for her next move.

_As if he were ten steps ahead._

(She wouldn’t let that happen.)

Cassie made for the third crystal, sprinting like rushing winds across the field to get there within seconds. As quick as she could, she climbed up the tower, digging bleeding talons into obsidian, leaping for a different side when the dragon fired at her, or when Axel sent a bomb her way. There were moments where she fluttered in the wind, when she was caught off-balance, but those moments didn’t last. Soon enough she’d be back to where she was, a relentless serpent making quick work of the spire.

Soon, she arrived at the top, facing the crystal; and far behind it, Axel with his cannon. She took out her weapon as she walked around it, angling herself so her back faced where the rogue stood.

She looked behind her. He stared back, a hand ready at the lever.

She grinned.

The dragon roared in a mix of frustration and agony as she destroyed the crystal. The fireball struck too late, as Cassie was already soaring through the air, the shockwaves of the impact sending everything away from the dying crystal, including the dragon, as it was caught off-guard.

Cassie Rose landed gracefully on her feet, weapons ready as she stood to face Axel, ready to pounce on the breaking tower.

She didn’t hesitate to strike.

They dodged each other’s attacks and struck when they could, maneuvering the uneven, jagged top of the broken spire. They flowed with the wind, a dance rhyming along to the rhythm of the dragon’s wings, and the rapid beating of their “hearts”— _thump-thump-thump-thump,_ **_thump-thump-thump-thump_ **. 

Tapping, prancing, pounding - until eventually, one of them faltered.

Cassie caught him off-guard, strayed _just a little_ off the beat, and let him stumble and get too ahead of himself. He prepared to pound her head into the ground, but she dodged, and in the milliseconds before he could realize, she poisoned him. The needles punctured his “skin,” and the dark, black matter poisoned his soul, creeping, crawling, ever closer to his heart.

He stared at her, wide-eyed. The dragon screamed his name.

She jumped off the platform and giggled with glee as the rushing winds accompanied her fall, howling in her ear and muffling the sound of the dragon’s mistimed meteor.

The top of the spire exploded with the crystal, and the rest of it fell apart.

Cassie glided safely to the surface while sending the dragon her widest smile. The earth trembled with its roars of grief, as loud and bloodcurdling as the passing of a train.

* * *

* * *

**4**

The subway was horribly familiar.

Even if the details were murky before, with the fog of a dream, she could still recognize aspects of it. The tiles of the tunnels, the metal barriers, the maps of the network, and the screens showing nothing but static.

Cassie Rose sat there, on the plastic benches, her hands now empty. A metal can, thrown away somewhere in this cold maze, was turned over and leaking.

There was no one else in the subway.

No one else but the cold, cold wind blowing in.

It came through the long winded tunnels, which seemed to have no end. Nothing but darkness for miles and miles ahead. It came through the stairs, the way to the higher levels of the station; the way to, eventually, the exit.

...She wondered if she could ever find it.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a whistle; a soft, beeping alarm signalling the arrival of a train. It screeched to a halt, the doors lining up with the gates. Once it stopped, the gates hissed open; a light going green.

Open to passengers.

Cassie got up slowly, abandoning the metal can, the exit in the maze upstairs.

Entering the car, the doors closed shut behind her; and darkness swallowed her as the train disappeared into the tunnel.

* * *

For a while, there is little noise in the car.

The handles hanging from the ceiling shook and rattled, metal and plastic bumping into each other as the train sped down the tracks. The loud rumbles and vibrations of the train were hard to miss. They were mind numbing and almost head-ache inducing.

But for a while, that is all there is.

Cassie breathed evenly, unmoving in the darkness. She sits on the cushioned seats, her hands even on her lap.

She knows she’s not alone in the train.

Even in the darkness, the presence of other people is clear. Two other people, to be precise. They’re situated at opposite ends of the car. They know where she is, they saw her enter.

She can feel their eyes on her.

She smiles as the reverberating feeling of the tunnels quickly lessens. They’re reaching the end of the tunnel.

Any second.

She can hear them get up, the sounds of iron and leather moving in the dark.

Slowly, she stands too.

Then light floods the train, the blinding sunset washing everything in an orange haze. Maya and Gill are unbothered, though. They draw their weapons, glaring straight at Cassie.

(The handlebars rattle, the train rumbling as it passes over the tracks. Shadows dance as the train zooms past the sunset.)

She grins, more than happy to oblige.

* * *

Immediately, she shoots Maya with poison, slowing the girl down because she _knows_ she’ll come at her first.

(She knows Aiden’s friends.

She knows how much they love him.

~~How much he loves them.)~~

~~So why fight them?~~

She ignores Maya’s cry as she charges at Gill, leaving scratches on the metal poles as she swings, forcing him to back away. In this cramped train car, there’s not much space to swing. 

And nowhere to run.

Cassie switches her sword for an axe and swings again, her blade meeting his, which he almost barely brings up in time to block. She manages to put just enough force to push him down, making him stumble and fall. When she swings again, prepared to pin him to the floor, he can only clumsily back away and try to stand.

She almost has him, the pulsing maroon of his soul in her sights, ready to break - which only annoys her more as she has to whip around and block an attack from Maya. The girl is snarling, her soul burning white as bright as the sparks their blades make, every fiber of her being fighting the poison in her system, devoting itself to tearing Cassie apart. It would amuse Cassie, maybe even fascinate her, had it not put her in a vulnerable enough position to let Gill attack her from behind.

With a frustrated shout, she lets go and maneuvers away, slashing at Maya as she pushes herself away from the corner.

The two Blaze Rods glare at her. Maya readies her crossbow; Gill, his sword.

(She wonders, briefly, if Aiden could get them to back down.)

She readies her poison and gives them a beckoning grin, allowing a shot at Gill to mark the next round.

* * *

Maya and Gill are not warriors.

They fight Cassie off - but they can only do so for so long. They land many hits on her, but she hurts them twice as much. The two would be enough to stall for time, a barrier between her and the real goal - but that’s all they are.

Just mooks.

Meaningless obstacles.

_In her way._

The sun is disappearing as it lowers in the horizon, the sky going purple and black as the hours set in. The two are weak. Cassie poisoned Maya earlier on, and landed many a hit on both of them, weakening them more and more. It’s only a matter of time. She easily fights them off as their resolve weakens, until, finally -

“NO!”

Blood spurts like a fountain as she digs the blade of her axe into Gill’s chest. The noises he makes are meaningless, now - gasps becoming gurgles as he drowns in his own blood, agonized cries becoming nothing as her poison seeps into his system and worsens his pain. The squelch as she pulls her weapon out is just as satisfying, the feel of something loosening, at ease, breaking away from a lock fills her with euphoria; and she can’t help but grin as she marvels at her work.

It’s no less ruined when she registers Maya’s cries.

She turns to her then, her blood soaked figure moving slowly to the other end of the car as the sunlight fades and the darkness returns. 

Maya’s bright white soul, slowly being consumed by dark, black, poison, and the reflection in her pale eyes, is the last thing Cassie sees before she swings her axe; and the train disappears into another tunnel.

The rattling comes to a stop. The vibrations subside.

The metal doors hiss open, and the cold air returns.

The artificial light floods the train.

Cassie breathes it in, closing her eyes as she soaks in the sensations. The blood covering the seats and the floor and the windows. The cracked, hardened stains on her skin that makes it feel like her limbs are turning into stone. Her chest rising and falling, the contrasting feeling of being alive.

The cold, artificial air that she breathes in.

_It’s amazing._

It really, truly is.

Are you really happy with this?

Yes.

But she can only bask in it for so long.

Slowly, she relaxes and calms herself down. Dull the senses again. Somebody else is here.

She opens her eyes and grips her weapon tight, acknowledging the feeling of somebody behind her, the sense tickling up her back like an annoying bug she has to get rid of.

She turns around, ready to face Jesse.

But she freezes when her eyes land on Aiden.

* * *

* * *

**5**

The sight catches her off-guard, a dream coming to reality. She can only mutter his name in disbelief, “Aiden?”

“...Hey, Cassie,” he says. His voice is low and weak and hoarse, his words almost completely silent. His lips twitch upwards, in a faint, small smile.

He’s almost exactly as she imagined him to be. The deep, dark brown of his hair; his scarred skin; his tall stature - but he looks like he's been through hell. He looks _tired_. Worn down, as he stands there limply. His jacket is a mess, holes torn through and even hanging off of him in some places.

And through those holes, she can see a pulse of pale blue.

His soul.

It’s so small. It’s a fraction, less than an _eighth_ of the regular human soul, a fragile shard glowing a soft blue; and it isn’t what she expects at all. None of this is. Aiden was fiery and passionate and driven and aggressive - yet he stands here in front of her, limp, exhausted, and frail.

And his eyes - a deathly pale, yet beautiful green - don’t look back at her at all.

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Then something in her cracks.

“Wh- What?” Her mind scrambles between the excitement at finally meeting him in person, and the detachment in the words he just said, “What do you mean-?”

“You know exactly what he means,” His voice cackles in her ear. And all of a sudden, it loses all comfort, any security she associated with it is gone. He sounds distorted now; twisted, corrupted.

And his mouth doesn’t move. He’s right there, standing in front of her, at the opposite side of the gate; and he just stares.

(At her, but never looks into her eyes.)

She lets out a whimper, a helpless calling of his name; soft and barely above a whisper, begging for all of this to be a nightmare and nothing more. “Aiden-”

“You were in this wasteland for so long,” the voice continues. It’s amplified now; a loud, harsh noise blasted in her ears. It’s Aiden’s voice, but edited, changed, it’s- _it’s_ _not him_.

It’s not him.

Ba’w t nhpwx sal tnt moike alvleem.

“You were back home, but nobody was here to welcome you. Everybody else was a monster, corrupted by the virus placed here so long ago. _So you killed everyone you met_ ,” the voice said, tone laced with disgust and exasperation; and she couldn't help the sob that escaped her, the weak, “No,” begging and in denial; but the voice continued without sympathy.

“Then after that, you got so lonely. Surrounded by nothing but corpses in the dead earth. What were you supposed to do now?” It said mockingly. Cassie struggled against the sobs.

(Was she ashamed? Was she embarrassed?

She didn’t know why she was crying. She just knew everything still hurt.)

“You tried to fill the void. You gave yourself a new objective: _kill the ones responsible for thi_ s. Take your revenge on the New Order of the Stone. It didn’t matter if they were only copies of the real thing - anything would do. So you made it all up, tried to make sense of your delusions.”

“No-”

“The Order’s amulet -”

“No!”

“- the prototype earpiece you stole from Champion City -”

“ _No!_ ”

“- and the office.”

“ **_NO-!_ **”

“You reached out for a friend. Somebody who you thought could be close to you. Somebody you thought, if you met in any other context, you could trust.”

_Somebody who could make you feel less alone._

And everything finally shattered.

It was as if glass was breaking slowly, a steady, ever-growing pressure being put upon it, just enough to cause cracks to spread incrementally. A crushing weight, a firm hand gripping her heart tight and _squeezing_ , letting all the energy and feelings and conscience bleed out and dissipate from the hurt - until it finally burst.

And here she was now. In the fallout. Standing in the middle of broken shards and spilled blood.

In front of the man she thought she knew.

_“You were never real.”_

It comes out of her in a quiet gasp, a weak whimper - all that she could muster in the aftermath of the realization.

Aiden - the _real_ Aiden - chuckles softly, humorlessly. His soul glows faintly. She’s surprised she could comprehend any of that, as tears she couldn’t help blurred her vision. The dark hand of the truth gripped her tight, making her freeze, making her feel cold and uncomfortably chilly in the bloodsoaked concrete and metal and plastic.

“I’m sorry,” he says with a small smile. There’s a sadness in his eyes, pity and sympathy too - but there’s also anger, and despair, and questions.

Questions about the blood she stands in.

“But you killed my friends.”

And the darkness of the tunnels, the darkness of the night and the purple sunset creeps in, bleeding into the station the longer she stands there dumbfounded. And there is no more sympathy in his voice or in his eyes - there’s just anger now. And pain. And -

And fear.

And fear, flooding his pale eyes, a storm of unanswered questions and emotions swirling in the foggy, pale green. 

...She stares at him and takes in the sight of him. His height, his jacket, his face, his voice - the look in his eyes.

He was everything she imagined he would be.

And that made it hurt all the more.

* * *

She had to strike first.

She slashed at him, a large, diagonal scar left on his chest as he stumbled to the station floor. He struggled to get up, and she almost waited to give him time to, but her vision was blurry _and the noises in her head were too much._

(The distorted voices, the amplified screams and the wet sounds of blood-)

She cut through it, hoping to make it stop, and slashed again, opening a wound on his stomach.

_And he screamed._

And it hurt to hear. The bloodcurdling, shrill screech. She couldn’t hold it back - she cried, she sobbed, crumbling where she stood and losing grip of her weapon.

It was too much, too much, _too much._

_She needed the noise to stop._

So she pinned him down, straddled on top of him - unable to breath, unable to see, unable to hear - and she raised her blade and stabbed wherever she felt flesh. Hoping to cut through it, hoping to sever a wire to make it all stop. But his screams- they wouldn’t stop wouldn’t stop wouldnt stop- _again._ Again, again, again. Stab him again, pierce the flesh, the muscle, the soft, small, soul glowing a baby blue, blue like the tiles at the train station, blue like a lake, still and peaceful under a castle in the sky; soft blue and small and _dying_ , tainted red with his spurting blood-

.

.

.

* * *

It reduced to a low hum.

A buzz in the system, faint and muffled, losing itself in the echoes of a vast, empty chamber.

It was as close to quiet as she could get to.

She finally registered the sound of her heavy, ragged breaths, the loudest thing in the quiet station. There were no... no more screams. No more wet sounds of blood.

Her sword was buried as far as it could into Aiden’s chest. Everything was covered in red.

And his soul - his tiny, fragile, fracture of a soul - was gone.

One look at his face forced her to close her eyes and choke back a sob.

_Fuck._

What has she done?

_What has she done?_

What _have_ you done?

All of a sudden, a force collided into her and sent her flying, and before she could even gather herself to comprehend that, she hit an obsidian wall; and a scream ruptured itself from her chest as the impact rippled through her body and doubled as she fell to the ground.

Her head was pounding, her back burning -

And there was no Aiden to ask her if she was okay.

It stung.

Still, she got up with a groan, desperately gathering her composure in whatever way she could, struggling through the tears to look for the source of the ambush. She looked up, finding, once again, the frozen moon; the star-less sky; and the obsidian spires she destroyed earlier.

The End.

The dragon that flew overhead confirmed it.

She didn’t have to stare up for so long. He eventually landed, staring at her all the while as he glided to a stop at the opposite end of the island. His eyes, dark and humane, stared at her.

Beckoned her to attack.

Her head was pounding, hurting; her eyelids drooping as she struggled to stay upright. The blood that covered her person - it was so uncomfortable. It felt so humid, like moss or vines, and the dried blood made her feel as stiff as stone.

And it felt so jarring - this quiet “End,” the sand she stood in, the broken obsidian… How still everything was, clashed with her pounding, thrumming heart and the blood that rushed through her.

(The blood on her hands- Aiden’s blood. _Aiden’s blood._

 _Aiden was-_ _She-_ )

Even now, everything was… too much…

(Even without the friend, the voice she had in her head.)

She stared at the dragon, at Jesse.

At the man who imprisoned her in a pit and kept her from going home.

At the man who shouldn’t have been affected by the virus.

At the man who was the very reason for why this nightmare was happening to her in the first place.

She didn’t even realize she drew her axe until it was in her hands, the feel of the wood a comfortable and familiar sensation.

(The colors blended together, the images merging. Different versions of the same picture, of the same person, of the same story, amalgamated into one confusing, clunky… image. stimulus.

Paints dumped together in a bucket.)

Cassie Rose swung her axe over her head, eyes set on Jesse, willing to do anything to make the noises stop.

* * *

He was just like the Ender Dragon.

So easy to get rid of.

She couldn’t understand why the Order just didn’t deal with it normally, why Soren had to go out of his way to delete it. She knew him. She knew how capable he was of so many other things - was he really so much of a coward that he couldn’t face off a simple dragon?

...She supposed it didn’t matter.

Jesse fought her like he had a death wish. He was always in range of her long-range attacks, and he was always too slow to deal with her melee weapons. She eventually got so close, she could climb up his back, scratching him and leaving dozens upon dozens of wounds as she clawed her way up, opening up several wounds and breaking his scales. He soared in the air with a loud, bellowing yell, trying to throw her off - but she dug her nails deeper into his skin, drawing blood, clinging herself to him, and he screamed.

(As loud and annoying as it was, hearing the sound of his pain brought her satisfaction, a thrill fueling the adrenaline coursing through her.

It didn’t help at all.)

An obsidian spire up ahead, he dove straight for it, and before Cassie could react, he intentionally collided with it, forcing her off him and sending her flying. She caught herself midair; though a bit winded, she managed to steady herself, in time to face Jesse and dodge his attack.

In the void, high above the desert and the obsidian and the forest; the two fired at the same time, poison and fire meeting in a tremendous explosion.

Like the powerful flames of an enchanted flint and steel.

High above the land, high above the pit of endermites, high above the nothing - Cassie and Jesse soared, moving from place to place, dodging each other’s attacks, avoiding each other, chasing each other to land a hit. It was almost hilarious how similar their powers were, given how much of a foil they were of the other. The claws that drew blood, the strong wings that let them fly through the air at high speeds. Even back at the mansion, at the pit - they were as good as equals, barely enough to hold off the other.

Either of them could have won.

Either of them could win.

(She couldn’t let him win this time.

 _Not this time._ )

He was here again, at the ledge, with the flint and steel. She’s at the portal.

(He’s landed on an obsidian spire, staring at her, preparing another fireball. She’s facing him directly, waiting.

He won’t catch her off guard this time.)

The ball of rock and flame comes flying, and Cassie dives away, wasting no time in flying straight for Jesse, her arms outstretched, talons ready -

(Jesse falls into the pit, into the endermites. They eat him up and tear him to pieces, reveal the manmade parts and the redstone hidden within.)

And she tackles him, forcing both of them to fall several feet above ground as she grips the skin of his neck and buries her blade as deep as she could, letting the poison course through him and finish him off.

(She looks into his eyes - a dark, deep brown - and he looks into hers.

The feeling surprises her this time, and she gasps, shuts her eyes, and looks away.)

A cloud of dust and sand erupts as they crash into the end.

* * *

She recovers with no problem. Even as every part of her body hurts, even as every part of her body is numb, even as she staggers as she gets up from the mess of a corpse left behind - there’s still a thrill coursing through her, a drumming beat that never lets go.

 _Bothering her_.

With Jesse destroyed, there’s only one thing left.

One more - and everything will be over.

She turns swiftly to her target; to the last of the Order, to the nightmare, to the one whose soul she knew was missing a small piece.

(All because of her.)

Olivia stood stiff and straight, her hands balled into fists, a cloth wrapped around her head and eyes.

Still, even with the blindfold, she knew she was staring directly at her.

Cassie Rose breathed a laugh as she fixated on her target, and without another word, she charged at her, her weapons ready, ready to draw blood, ready for the noise to stop-

But Olivia dodged. “Stop!” She yelled as she moved away.

“You won’t get in my head anymore,” Cassie growled, “Won’t give me nightmares anymore!”

She charged and slashed again, tried to shoot poison at her - but Olivia dodged again.

“Cassie, stop!”

Her blue axe, her signature weapon - the shining diamonds gleamed in the moonlight, despite the blood, despite the dull blade, ~~despite the fact that it’s not even there anymore .~~

She raised it over her head to swing at her target-

“Stop it! _Stop!_ ”

A miss, but not a bother. She prepared to swing again, to charge, to hurt, to make it stop-

 _“_ **_Rose_ ** _, I said stop!”_

All of a sudden, everything silenced.

Like a blade cut through the air, cut through the wind, leaving behind the sharp, white sting of a gaping wound. As if glass shattered; as if time itself froze.

(That name,

Nobody ever-)

Olivia took hold of her weapon and threw it away with ease, in part because she couldn’t fight her. She couldn’t resist. As if the tight knots holding skin taut were finally released; swollen skin left pinkish scars and burning rashes; and she’d gone limp, trembling, and everything hurt. Everything stung.

But she couldn’t bring herself to move.

“Don’t you understand?” Olivia’s voice was weepy, trembling and shaking as if she herself couldn’t stay upright any longer; yet, in the End, it was still loud and clear - more than enough to reach her head.

“We were never going to fight you! We…”

She took in a shaky breath, intercepted by choked sobs and hiccups. She shook her head in dismay, in grief, in sorrow; in despair. In overwhelming, suffocating, terrifying despair.

And although blindfolded, she turned back to the girl crying in the hindsight of her actions, crying at the blood on her hands; and she could feel her eyes, her voice, her words, piercing through the cloth, directed straight towards her.

“We were _never_ going to fight you.”

She could only stare at her hands, which trembled uncontrollably, _painfully_ ; rough with bruises and calluses; caked in blood and dirt. 

Her fingers, in particular, hurt. Sharp talons chipped and dulled.

“...Rose.”

She couldn’t say a thing.

Without anything to say, she took out the soul in her inventory - which sat there for who knows how long; doing nothing, being nothing - and she held it in her hands. The orb glowed and hummed.

There were words there, somewhere. Thoughts.

A consciousness.

She grit her teeth against the sobs that began to escape her, and closed her fists, crushing the soul to pieces.

It was nothing now.

(More blood. Even now, she couldn’t stop.)

...With the questions and the pain and the tired anger boring holes into her skull, it was all she could do to avoid Olivia’s eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **  
>  [END](https://mngmt117.wixsite.com/masterpost/act-1-end)   
>  **
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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